Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Man Of Many Talents

Fine blogger and musician, Brew, has a CD called “Get Out of Iraq” that you can buy there at the convention or online at Simplefears.com

Go to the link for a sample. It’s a good tune.

Send Me

Gotta love Clinton. He just has that Mojo.

I can’t remember what the event was, but I remember hearing him do that “send me” riff before and I think it’s very powerful. It’s a biblical reference that resonates with those who respond to that, but it’s also poetic and inspiring to the secular. It’s the kind of language that Amy Sullivan and others are alwasy talking about — not explicitly religious, but resonent to the religious.

He has that very rare gift of being able to discuss complex issues in simple ways without being condescending. (Edwards has that ability, too.) He drew the contrast between the parties in ways that people who don’t follow politics and feel uncomfortable with the emotion involved can wrap their arms around.

It was a good night, I think. Everybody up there were Democratic stars and since this is essentially a televised pageant, political star power is a potent plus for us. Since St. Ronnie the GOP has been reduced to flogging cartoon characters like Schwarzenegger, but they don’t have real political superstars. Our politicans are actually much more fun to watch.

Calling All Blogs

Jeff Greenfield is flogging the idea that that stupid picture of Kerry on Drudge is exploding all over the blogosphere and is comparable to the famous Dukakis in a tank pic.

I think it’s time to drag out this one again:

Crusader Codpiece looks very impressive here, don’t you think?

Oh, and by the way, he fell off his bike again today.

Blog Conventions

I’m giving out my first day of the convention blogging award to—- a non-blogger. I’m sorry guys, but as interesting as the inside baseball stuff about Verizon and logistics and celebrity sightings is (and it is) the blogging award of Day One goes to Harold Meyerson at the convention blog on American Prospect Online for actually reporting things I hadn’t heard anywhere else:

AFL-CIO CAUCUS, SUNDAY, 3:20 P.M.: Labor unveiled one major tactical twist at its delegate caucus on Sunday afternoon. AFSCME President Jerry McEntee, who has chaired the AFL-CIO’s political committee since the Van Buren administration, announced that on the afternoon and evening of George W. Bush’s speech to the Republican convention — Thursday, September 2 — union activists will knock on the doors of one million union households in the 16 battleground states.

I like it.

Harman told me that Democrats think it’s possible that Bush may spring into action on the intelligence reform front as soon as Friday, possibly calling Congress back into session to deal with the 9-11 Commission’s recommendations. (Of course, this would also have the effect of shifting attention away from the Kerry-Edwards ticket that will be nominated on Thursday.) The Democrats have no intention of having this issue taken away from them, however. Harman said that tomorrow morning at 8:00 A.M., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will convene a Democratic House Caucus meeting here in Boston, which Harman will address, to make sure the Democrats have the fullest possible proposal on the table before Bush acts.

I’m sure you are all aware that the day after the convention is like the afterglow day. The campaign found its big release the night before and smoked its metaphorical cigarette and everybody’s in love. For Bush to burst through the bedroom door is pretty darned uncivil but predictable. The Dems are all together and they should be able to formulate a counter strategy.

This is interesting stuff.

 

Message Strategery

Salon has an interesting article up about a fiery meeting earlier today at the Veteran’s Caucus where Wes Clark, James Carville and Max Cleland supposedly went off the reservation and got the vets all riled up. (This happened after an earlier caucus meeting where Sharpton allegedly went off the reservation and got the Black Caucus all riled up.)

“There’s another party out there, and they would have you believe that they’re the best qualified to keep America safe and secure,” Clark said. “I’m here to say it’s not so.”

In a building riff that brought veterans to their feet, Clark said: “That flag is our flag. We served under that flag. We got up and stood reveille formation, we stood taps, we fought under that flag. We’ve seen men die for that flag, and we’ve seen men buried under that flag. No Dick Cheney or John Ashcroft or Tom DeLay is going to take that flag away from us.”

Clark’s fiery performance knocked the GOP-style stuffing out of the veterans’ event, turning it into a Bush-bashing barnburner. By the time Carville reclaimed the stage he was in full sputtering ragin’ Cajun mode. “I know the Kerry people back there are having a heart attack,” Carville said. “They’re saying, ‘There goes Carville, the mad dog, the pit bull.'”

Uh huh.

It seems to me that the Kerry campaign’s public face of cheery optimism barely holding back the furious grassroots is a pretty good strategy. Everybody keeps parroting the party line like “positive” and “upbeat” when they’re talking to the celebcorps while even speakers like Jimmy Carter(?) allude to Bush’s national guard service and lying. You end up wondering what they’d be saying if Kerry hadn’t “given the word” to be disciplined. He shows leadership and the Democrats look like they’re ready for a fight. The Republicans are frustrated because they want the Democrats to make the mistake they made in 1992 and go over the top.

It’s as if the Party has Jack Nicholson’s smile.

I Already Need A Drink

Is there anything more thrilling than watching the likes of Anderson “Pretty Boy” Cooper spew stale, outdated uninformed conventional wisdom all over national television? I’ve watched a lot of conventions but the coverage of this one is shaping up to be the most condescending and unelightening ever. They might as well have sent Ashley and MaryKate. (Actually, have you seen either one of them in the same room as Anderson Cooper?)

May I recommend a trip over to C-Span? The speeches are boring, but at least they are sincere. (Fox News team just got a hearty boo from the crowd.)You get to see lots of shots of the delegates instead of the absurd celebcorps who haven’t even the slightest interest in anything but trivia. And the films are actually quite good.

As Professor DeLong plaintively cries, “Why, oh why can’t we have a better press corp?”

Conventional Wisdom

I gather that Theresa Heinz-Kerry was rude to a reporter for a right wing rag that has been smearing her all over Pennsylvania for the last year and that there are a lot of totally, like, cool parties that people want to go to but can’t get in to but maybe they’ll get into if they meet the right cool person who can get them in. And it was fine for all the media celebs to go to a ballgame but it was a total disaster for Kerry to do so. All of this is a sign of Democratic haplessness.

Meanwhile, the “drama” of the first night  is whether any of the speakers will deviate from what are alleged to be Kerry’s direct orders not to “trash” Bush. It’s ex-president’s (and shouldhavebeen president) night and you never know what those crazy left wing kooks are going to do.  Will Carter tell Bush to go fuck himself?  Will Al Gore tell the GOP to shove it? Will Bill call Junior and Dick major league assholes? Who knows? But it’s so exciting watching the media speculate about it. Because if the Democrats  do deviate from Kerry’s direct orders,  you know what that means.  The Democrats are in … disarray. Which means that the mediawhores can just read from all the scripts of Democratic conventions from the last 40 years and concentrate on those fantastic parties.

One little observation: if you get into those allegedly cool parties they are usually populated by people you criticize harshly on a daily basis. Perhaps once you meet them, though, you won’t want to trash them on a daily basis because they were, like, so totally cool at that party you got into. That’s the dynamic of Washington socializing and it leads to … Richard Cohen. Frankly, the only blog report of parties I’ m truly interested in are Wonkette’s.  She is, after all,  a professional.

If somebody wants to take a different tack they might think about trying to get into some uncool parties — like where the delegates from Ohio go. They aren’t very glamorous, but they are the blogworld’s much beloved grassroots of the Democratic party. Maybe they would have an interesting, non-blogging, non-media, non-celebrity take on this crazy democracy thing.

 

Brass Knuckles

Check out Terry McAuliffe’s new brainchild: Where Was Bush?

The right-wing attack machine doesn’t want you asking questions about Bush’s record, and they’re doing everything they can to change the subject. Here are five facts to keep in mind when facing their attacks.

Questioning Bush’s Record Does Not Denigrate Guard

Bush Received Special Treatment in National Guard

Bush’s Whereabouts Unclear During 1972-1973

Bush Should Have Done More During 1972-1973

Bush Has Yet to Explain Missing Records

There’s a lot more, plus a handy e-mail tool to send this information to everyone you know.

Anatomy Of A Smear

Dave at Seeing The Forest deconstructs the multi-pronged GOP campaign to smear Clinton for 9/11 and let Bush off the hook. As he says:

Republicans fight back with smears to discredit their accusers. They constructed a 3-part discrediting action that phased in, coming to a conclusion just before the commission releases its report.

For those of you who didn’t follow the previous Clinton smears in detail, this is a classic GOP operation. We have the merging stories of Gorelick, Wilson and Berger — a combination of character assasination, misrepresentation and the exploitation of unrelated credibility issues to form the basis of a counterfactual narrative that is much more juicy than the real thing. A dark conspiracy is set forth in the right wing press, then filters into the mainstream and tittilates the mediawhores with its more exciting version of events. Scoops are given to favored reporters and new facts dished out judiciously to keep the story going long beyond its natural life.

Read Dave’s post for the details. This is how its done.

Update: The incomparable Howler has more on this story. I realize that it’s long past time we asked just who in the hell is Kelli Arena and why is she always in the middle of these GOP psuedo-scandal pageants? Does anyone out there know who her special friend in the White House is?

King Of The Scumbags

I wrote sometime back about David Bossie over on the American Street. He’s always been one of the more shocking examples of Republican depravity and corruption, and not incidentally, a mediawhore favorite. Eric Boehlert has a bravura takedown of this little miscreant in today’s Salon.

Boehlert asks why Bossie is taken seriously in the press. It’s an excellent question, but it is silly to actually ask such a thing. Bossie has been doing this stuff for more than a decade and the media have never given a shit that he is a proven liar over and over again. And that’s because they never pay a price for sucking up his very juicy dictation:

For David Bossie, professional Clinton-era agitator and renowned Republican dirty trickster, these must seem like the good old days. During the 1990s Bossie, as a grass-roots activist and congressional staffer, was often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish — and usually unsubstantiated — assertions about White House wrongdoing

[…]

Bossie’s style during the investigation was to lob scattershot allegations toward an appreciative press corps that rarely seemed upset when the charges he gave them to amplify — that Whitewater was a criminal enterprise, for instance — failed to pan out as factual. As Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, “He made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps.” But none of this appears to have marred Bossie’s reputation with reporters, even when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich — no stranger to hardball partisan politics — reportedly ordered Bossie fired from his congressional staff position in May 1998. Bossie had overseen the bungled release of supposedly incriminating recordings of Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell’s jailhouse phone conversations with Hillary Rodham Clinton — recordings that had been edited, deleting obvious exculpatory remarks.

Now some critics wonder how a political prankster like Bossie has managed to maintain respectability in Washington, particularly among the press. A Nexis search retrieves more than 100 press references to Bossie this year, with MSNBC proving to be especially accommodating toward him. “Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we’re defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously,” says former Clinton aide Paul Begala. “There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them.”

[…]

The press has also been hesitant to discuss, or dissect, Bossie’s current role. For instance, during the controversy surrounding the release of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” many news outlets, including the New York Times in a June 27 article, simply identified Bossie as the president of Citizens United. But the Times is well acquainted with Bossie’s modus operandi; he has boasted about feeding information to its reporters, especially Jeff Gerth, every step of the way in their ill-advised, and since discredited, Whitewater investigation. “We have worked closer [on Whitewater] with the New York Times than the Washington Times,” Bossie’s colleague Brown once bragged to the Columbia Journalism Review.

And as the Washington Times noted, Bossie made a deal to leak the Senate Whitewater Committee’s final report to the New York Times. Yet years later, when Bossie reemerges in the news as a critic of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to unsuspecting Times readers he’s described simply as another grass-roots Republican activist.

“At the very least, you’d expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes,” says David Brock, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal online research and monitoring organization. “That doesn’t seem like the type of person whose words are worth much.”

“As a principle I’d agree readers ought to know where particular sources are coming from,” says Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who has dealt with Bossie for many years. “On the other hand, I don’t think David Bossie makes any secret about what his agenda is and where he’s coming from.”

In the past, reporters who fed off Bossie’s wayward leaks were reluctant to shed light on his ability to engineer stories behind the scenes. In the early 1990s, the press printed and broadcast verbatim the Whitewater allegations being leveled by Citizens United and its ready-made press packets. Yet reporters rarely made public the source of their Whitewater leads. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time, the press “has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization without identifying the group as the source of their information.”

[…]

Bossie has generated unusual loyalty from some in the press corps. “Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me,” ABC News producer Chris Vlasto notoriously told the Washington Post in one of its several Bossie profiles in the 1990s. Vlasto, who did not return a call for comment, made that statement in 1997, five years after the accusations about Whitewater were first raised and two years after the Clintons were exonerated by the Resolution Trust Corp., whose conclusions were confirmed by every subsequent official investigation. “On this record,” the RTC reported, “there is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct … It is recommended no further resources need be expended on the Whitewater part of this investigation.” Yet those reporters who subsisted on Bossie’s handouts, including some at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News, did not report the RTC’s vindication of the Clintons. ABC’s Vlasto, who had invested mightily in the Whitewater story, insisted, “If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I’d believe Bossie any day.”

[…]

In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had “dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater.” Another mailing reported that Bossie was “on the inside directing the probe.” Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D’Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.

In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie’s deceptive presence to “Ollie North running around the House.”

In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of “unrelenting” self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible “to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney’s Office.” (Bossie’s habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)

The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw the release of the doctored Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the time, “At Bossie’s request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth] Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell’s prison conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was indicted.” According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close working relations with Starr investigators.

The tapes were edited for “privacy” considerations, according to Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.

Yet, in 1999, Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his “outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement.” And it wasn’t just the conservative base that continued to embrace Bossie after the Hubbell tape disgrace; so did many in the Washington press corps.

[…]

when the Enron scandal broke, Bossie appeared on Fox News and repeated GOP talking points that both political parties deserved blame because, after all, Enron’s former CEO, Kenneth Lay, slept in the Lincoln bedroom once while Clinton was in office. But that in fact never happened. Also that year, Bossie appeared on TNN’S late-night show, “Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon,” where he dissected, yet again, the supposed mysteries surrounding the suicide of Clinton aide Foster. Also that year, Bossie guaranteed that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2004.

In early 2003, Bossie’s group released a pro-Iraq War commercial starring former Tennessee senator and “Law and Order” actor Fred Thompson — to “combat the left-wing propaganda” Bossie asserted was coming from Hollywood. Bossie also made TV appearances to rail against France for its Iraq stance and call for an American boycott of French products.

This spring Bossie returned to his roots, producing an anti-Kerry ad that used recent “priceless” MasterCard ads to parody “another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts.” (According to Bossie, the ad’s light touch was meant to stand in contrast to the left’s “hate-filled speech and vitriol” aimed at Bush.) The spot, actually seen by very few TV viewers, produced a nice publicity bump for Bossie as the same network of reporters and pundits he’d cultivated for years with tips and leaks welcomed him into the unfolding campaign coverage. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews announced on “Hardball”: “Let me go to David Bossie. That ad is great, by the way.”

I especially like Michael Isikoff saying that everybody knows Bossie has an agenda as if a) “everybody” is a Washington insider and b) having an agenda is no different from being a lying sack of shit who worked as hard as he could to harrass a legally elected president out of office with the willing help of a criminally irresponsible press corps.

But then, that’s why we call them mediawhores.