Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Let ‘Em Have It

If the post debate spin tonight is as unfair and absurd as it has been in the past, it would be helpful if people would call the networks in large numbers and complain. It usually takes a few days to gel and it might be possible to turn an incorrect spin if we make an issue of it. If they don’t hear from us, they don’t realize that they are living in their own little media echo chamber.

Don’t jump to conclusions. Wait and watch for a while to see how it plays out. The press corpse might just see the obvious, for once, and realize that Bush’s canned, robotic responses are not persuasive and that the public really needs to hear something more than bumper sticker slogans. Bush’s cockiness and arrogance may just go too far this time and even the media may be put off by it. We know that Kerry is by far more intellectually prepared to answer questions and win in a fair debate. Perhaps the media will finally wipe the stardust from their eyes and recognise that outtakes from “Bonanza” are simply not adequate answers to serious questions.

But, if they immediately say that Kerry lost then call and complain. Tell them that you thought Kerry did great and that what you saw was the next president of the United States. Don’t accuse them of bias. Tell them you wonder if they watched the same debate you did.

If Bush spin grows tomorrow, call again. (Use those free nightime minutes. They aren’t good for anything else.) Let the media know that we are watching and listening and that they will hear from us.

My reader jake in the comment below says:

This tactic was at the backbone of the right’s onslaught on the media for the last 20 years. This phenomenon didn’t happen overnight. Straightening it out won’t happen quickly either. But it’s gotta start NOW.

And don’t email. That gets no attention. You have to call. You have to express yourself verbally and forcefully. You have to be clear, strong and organized. Don’t engage in twit-speak about your “feelings.” You also have to write letters…Paper ones, delivered in the mail (gasp! horrors!). As I said, I know because I’ve been in the belly of the beast forever.

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St

New York, NY 10023

Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796

Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795

World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040

peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com

Fax: (212) 456-2771

CBS News

www.cbsnews.com

542 W. 57th St.

New York, NY 10019

News Desk:

Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691

Fax: (212) 975-1893

CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center

POB 105366

Atlanta, GA 30348

Phone: (404) 827-1500

Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com

Speakout@foxnews.com

Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Phone: (212) 301-3000

Fax: (212) 301-4224

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

NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave

Washington, DC 20001

Phone: (202) 414-2323

Fax: (202) 414-3324

PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880

Washington, DC 20091

Phone: (800) 356-2626

Get your phone in hand. Listen to the democratic voices in the spin room and make note of their key words and phrases. Read your regular blogs after the debate.

Then get on the phone and make some calls. Tonight. If they fuck this up, the media need to hear from us.

“The Situation”

Everyone needs to read this. George W. Bush is living in a fantasyland of spin, pretending that things are getting better. George W. Bush has turned a potential threat into an active threat.

Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Reporter’s E-mail:

It’s hard to pinpoint when the ‘turning point’ exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess ‘the situation.’ When asked ‘how are thing?’ they reply: ‘the situation is very bad.”

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn’t control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country’s roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health — which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers — has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

We did not need to fight this particular war. We had a real war to fight and we did a half assed job of it in Afghanistan because certain members of the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to go after an old enemy who was not an imminent threat. Invading Iraq played into our real enemy’s hands and gave their cause new life and many, many recruits. It lost us friends and allies throughout the world. We are less safe than we would have been if George W. Bush had fought the war we needed to fight instead of the war he wanted to fight.

The American people do not want to believe that our government could make a mistake of such epic proportions. But it did and the man at the top needs to be fired. He is not willing to change course and fix his mistakes, so the American people are going to have to do it for him.

Read the entire piece. Send it to the media and ask them why they are covering this election as if it were a sporting event when it is a matter of life and death. “The situation” is lethal and Americans may have to pay a very heavy price if we don’t take this war out of Bush’s hands while we have the chance. He and his comrades have shown that they cannot be trusted to wage the war correctly.

Pool Coverage

I wrote yesterday that Fox would be in control of the feed of the debate tonight and therefore could not be trusted to show Kerry in a fair light. As it turns out, each network will have a choice of various shots.

Fox News is running the “pool” coverage, feeding multiple streams of video to the other networks — and also feeding suspicion in the liberal blogosphere that somehow the choice of images shown would be biased toward Bush — but it’s up to each control room what shots to show.

In the past, the feed that went out was the feed that everybody saw. I guess that’s changed. So, if they play games with the reaction shots, it’s the fault of the particular network, not necessarily FOX.

That’s something we should complain about as well. Keep those phone numbers handy. Work those refs.

Who Cares What Grieving Moms Think?

Apparently, the Dan Rather debacle has the quaking mediaswhores completely cowed. None of them are going to talk about anything “controversial” going forward.

So far in this campaign, the surest way for political advocacy groups to grab some TV exposure is to create commercials (the more emotional the better), buy airtime in a handful of swing states and then hold a press conference to announce the spots. The first Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad that argued Sen. John Kerry lied about his war medals won free airtime for weeks on cable television. More recently, an anti-Kerry ad mixing a grainy picture of Kerry in among notorious Islamic terrorists was dutifully noted by most major news organizations.

The latest ad buy entry came yesterday when families of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce two new emotional anti-Bush ads that are set to run in the crucial swing states of Florida, New Mexico and Nevada. Calling themselves RealVoices.org, the mothers of slain soldiers appear in the two ads, often in tears as they describe their loss and their anger over the war in Iraq.

Sounds like some pretty gripping stuff, right? Apparently not to TV news outlets. So far they’ve been overwhelmingly MIA on the story. Here’s an up-to-the-minute tally of the mentions that RealVoices.org has received so far:

CNBC: 0

CNN: 0

CNN Headline News: 0

Fox News: 0

MSNBC: 1

ABC: 0

CBS: 0

NBC: 0

*Sigh*

Write some e-mails folks. Work those cowardly refs. This is a powerful ad campaign and the goddamned gasbags ought to give it just as much coverage as they gave those swift boat bozos.

Here’s the CNN feedback page

or:

feedback@CNN.com

Crossfire@CNN.com

MSNBC:

hardball@msbnc.com

countdown@msnbc.com

joe@msnbc.com

FoxNews:

Fuggedaboudit

Rhymes With Wee-Ahtch

Spare me, dear readers, any more chastisement for making a very vague passing remark about Lynn Cheney’s backside. The nasty witch doesn’t seem to have a problem with mocking other people’s looks:

During a campaign stop in Minnesota yesterday, Mrs Cheney joined in the ridiculing of Mr Kerry.

As a group of volunteers moved into a crowd with microphones for a question-and-answer period, the vice-president told supporters to look for the people with dark orange shirts.

When Cheney paused as if searching to describe the shade of orange, his wife said: “How about John Kerry’s suntan?”

Live by Drudge, die by Drudge. If you want to be treated respectfully, you should probably behave respectfully — particularly if you have an ass the size of a love seat.

FYI

Wes Clark and Rudy Giuliani will be doing the live debate coverage with Jon Stewart tonight on The Daily Show: The place where the smart people go for their fake news.

When Will Bush Face The Grim Reality In Iraq?

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three bombs exploded at a neighborhood celebration Thursday in western Baghdad, killing 35 children and seven adults, officials said. Hours earlier, a suicide car bomb killed a U.S. soldier and two Iraqis on the capital’s outskirts.

The bombs in Baghdad’s al-Amel neighborhood caused the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the conflict in Iraq (news – web sites) began 17 months ago. The children, who were still on school vacation, said they had been drawn to the scene by American soldiers handing out candy.

[…]

“The Americans called us, they told us, ‘Come here, come here,’ asking us if we wanted sweets. We went beside them, then a car exploded,” said 12-year-old Abdel Rahman Dawoud, lying naked in a hospital bed with shrapnel embedded all over his body.

The day of violence, including insurgent attacks and U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah, left a total of 46 people dead and 208 wounded

[…]

Also Thursday, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera showed video of 10 new hostages seized in Iraq by militants. Al-Jazeera said the 10 — six Iraqis, two Lebanese and two Indonesian women — were taken by The Islamic Army in Iraq. The group has claimed responsibility for seizing two French journalists last month.

[…]

Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber struck in the Abu Ghraib area outside of Baghdad, killing the American soldier and at least two Iraqis, and wounding 60, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

That bomb targeted a compound housing the mayor’s office, a police station and other buildings, police 1st Lt. Ahmed Jawad said. A U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle parked in front of the compound was hit, Hutton said.

“I saw people flying in the air and falling on the ground,” said Saad Mohsin, who was in front of the mayor’s office and was struck by shrapnel.

[…]

American jets, tanks and artillery units repeatedly have targeted al-Zarqawi’s network in Fallujah in recent weeks as U.S.-led forces seek to assert control over insurgent enclaves ahead of elections slated for January. The military says the attacks have inflicted significant damage on the network, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.

Doctors say scores of civilians have been killed and wounded in the strikes.

Jesus H. Christ.

Are the American people going to fall for the same old tired tropes tonight about freedom and democracy and being resolute or are they going to demand to know why our president has us stuck in a living goddamned nightmare from which we cannot awake in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

If you want more of this, America, vote for George W. Bush. He’ll stay the goddamned course come hell or high water:

“Bush lied, my son died”

In a TV commercial released Wednesday, Cindy Sheehan, a 47-year-old woman from Vacaville, Calif., whose 24-year-old son was killed in Sadr City in April, speaks directly to George W. Bush.

Shot in black-and-white, her soft voice cracking, she says, “I imagined it would hurt if one of my kids was killed, but I never thought it would hurt this bad, especially someone so honest and brave as Casey, my son. When you haven’t been honest with us, when you and your advisors rushed us into this war. How do you think we felt when we heard the Senate report that said there was no link between Iraq and 9/11?”

This is one of four new ads featuring relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq, produced by a new political action committee called RealVoices.org. At a time when soldiers’ parents have been arrested at Bush rallies and thrown out of the Republican National Convention for trying to make themselves heard, Real Voices was formed to broadcast the excruciating messages of those who feel that their loved ones’ lives were wasted in Iraq.

Real Voices is spending $200,000 on its initial ad buy while trying to raise more money. Each one of the spots is bitter and searing. In one, Raphael Zappala, whose 30-year-old brother was killed in Baghdad while searching a warehouse for weapons of mass destruction, says, “My brother died trying to make an honest man out of George W. Bush, needlessly. He was betrayed by the lies of his commander in chief. And the troops still in Iraq are being betrayed.” Another features a California mother named Jane Bright, who remains livid about Bush’s rash “Bring ’em on!” challenge. “Mr. Bush,” she says, “I have no way of knowing whether the insurgent who killed my son ever heard your foolish taunt. But thanks to you, Mr. President, I have the rest of my life to wonder about it.”

[…]

One might think that Sheehan’s sacrifice would protect her from assaults by the right-wing patriotism police, but one would be wrong. Since she started speaking out, she’s been attacked as a political opportunist and accused of treason.

“I have had people tell me that what I’m doing is supporting terrorists and that my son would be ashamed of me,” she says. “I was on a radio call-in show on Sunday morning, and I had a lot of people call me a traitor.”

This group is raising money to run these ads in swing states. If you have any left to spare, this is a good place to put it.

Real Voices

Brat Boy Debater

In case anyone’s wondering why Bush and company negotiated hard for the networks not to show cut-away or reaction shots in the debate, this little passage from “When George meets John” by James Fallows explains it:

The debate was held in a tiny basement room on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso. The candidates’ families and a few local officials sat on metal folding chairs in the room; everyone else, including reporters, watched TV monitors elsewhere. Laura Bush sat a few feet away from Mauro’s children, whom she knew but (according to Mauro) did not speak to or acknowledge. According to the rules of this debate, insisted on by Bush’s team, the screen had to show only whichever candidate was speaking—that is, no cutaway or reaction shots were allowed

Therefore no one outside the room saw the miniature drama inside. Bush was halfway toward his presidential style, speaking more slowly and less gracefully than four years earlier, and with a more dismissive air toward his opponent. While Mauro was speaking, Bush would sigh, grimace, and send body-language messages of boredom or contempt. “It was incredible,” Mauro told me recently. “I almost can’t believe it in retelling it. Because the press was upstairs, they didn’t realize how aggressive he was on the stage—pulling the sleeve of the moderator, staring or winking at Laura in the crowd.” The moderator of the debate, Bob Moore, of the El Paso Times, told me that Bush actually grabbed him just before the debate: “In the hallway, Bush did grab me by the lapels, pull me close to his face, and say, ‘Bobby, you clean up real good.’ Typical Bush.” When Bush was on stage but off camera, Moore said, “there was that Bush smirk, rolling his eyes, all of which Bush is very good at.“

Now, supposedly the networks are not going to follow the negotiated restrictions:

And the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not a party to the agreement, said it could not be expected to enforce strictures on network coverage of the four debates.

At issue are rules that bar the networks from airing “cutaway” shots of either Republican President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry while they are waiting their turn to speak during the debates.

[…]

Fox News Channel, whose turn it is under a rotation system to operate the “pool” cameras for all the networks in the first debate on Thursday in Coral Gables, Florida, said it would follow its own editorial judgment in operating its cameras.

“They don’t want reaction shots,” said Fox News spokesman Paul Schur told Reuters. “We’re not going to bow to outside pressure. We’re not going to follow these restrictions.”

Yeah, sure.

This is a problem. FoxNews has a very bad track record of signalling GOP propaganda in debates. In the January 22 Democratic primary debate, they cut to their panel for immediate spinning by William Bennett before the debate was over.

Fox News is going to follow it’s own editorial rules all right. And, I think we know what they are, don’t we?

Dick’s Big Flop.

Most of you have undoubtedly seen this Campaign Extra post featuring an interview with Dick Cheney in 1992 via Atrios, but it’s worth thinking about a little bit.

Here’s what he said back then:

We stopped when we did, and it was a unanimous recommendation on the part of the President’s advisors, civilian and military, we stopped when we did because we had achieved our objectives. We had said from the outset that our purpose was to liberate Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein’s capacity to threaten his neighbors, his offensive military capability, we did that. We destroyed about two-thirds of his army in that portion that he sent in to Kuwait and Iraq, and stripped him of most of his weapons of mass destruction.

We could have gone on. There is no doubt in my mind, from a military standpoint we could have sent forces on down the road to Baghdad, captured Baghdad, but I would expect in terms of trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein that it would not have been an easy task. I don’t think it was the kind of situation where we could have pulled up with a paddywagon in front of the Presidential Palace and said, “Come on Saddam, you’re going to the slammer.” I think we would have had to run him to ground, and doing that in Baghdad or in a nation as large as Iraq would have involved a lot of US forces.

Once we rounded up Saddam, then the question is what do you do? You’re going to put a government in his place. Presumably, you’re not just going to turn your back and walk away. You have to put some kind of a government in its place. And then the question comes is it going to be a Shi’a government or a Kurdish government, or maybe a Sunni government, or maybe it ought to be based on the old Baathist Party regime, or some combination thereof.

How long is that government to be able to stay in power without US military support to keep it there? How long can we maintain the coalition?

Remember we entered into this activity with the support of 30 other nations. A very important part of that support was the support of other Arab nations who took up arms against a brother Arab state, who allowed us to operate military forces from their territory, who sent combat forces to fight alongside our people in Kuwait.

How long could we have maintained that coalition of Arab states if we had been involved in the long-range occupation by the US in Iraq? I would guess if we had gone on to Baghdad I would still have forces in Iraq today. I don’t know how we would have let go of that tar baby once we had grabbed hold of it.

A final point that I think is very important. Everybody is fond of looking back at Desert Storm and saying that it was, in fact, a low cost conflict because we didn’t suffer very many casualties. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low cost conflict. The question, to my mind, in terms of this notion that we should have gone on and occupied Iraq is how many additional American casualties would we have had to suffer? How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many.

Not very damn many…

Now, the harpies will screech at the top of their lungs, “But, 9/11 changed everything OHMYGODTHEYARETRYINGTOKILLUS!!!!!”

But, you know, it didn’t change the fact that Saddam had not reconstituted his WMD, that he had no ties to al Qaeda and that all we needed to do was to get weapons inspectors back into the country to harrass him and keep him in line. An invasion and occupation simply wasn’t necessary for our safety or the safety of those in the region.

Junior will wax on about liberating the Iraqi people and freeeeedom and demaaahcracy and loving yer neighbor like you just love to love yerself. But, if that’s why we did it — because we’re so good — then Unka Dick sure has some splaining to do. How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many. Yup.

It’s funny to me how differently I see the events of 9/11 changing “everything” than these people do. To me, it meant that we could not go gallivanting around the world “liberating” people if it meant that we would exacerbate the terrorist threat without any tangible benefit in security. Until this period of radicalism is brought under control or ends through other means, wars of liberation in the mid-east and the Indian subcontinent anyway, are just too dangerous. 9/11 turned me, a dyed in the wool liberal, from something of a Wilsonian internationalist into much more of a realist.

And, as I have written about many times before, we are much less safe today that we were before we let the entire world know that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find a weapon of mass destruction if it fell out of the sky and landed on the White House lawn. And now we’ve also let everybody know that we have a thinly stretched part-time military and a government that can’t get it together enough to plan an occupation properly.

A little mystery about the super powers of a super power is a very powerful thing. We are now looking pretty damned weak compared to what the world thought of us in January of 2002.

Weirdly, I think that Dick Cheney, of all people, would have agreed with me back in 1992. Sometime between then and now he drank the neocon fire water and it packs a punch. What did Lady MacMyleroie put in that stuff, anyway?