Multi Medium

Wanker Of The Day

John McCain, with honorable mention for CBS:

Keith Olbermann led his broadcast tonight with Spencer Ackerman’s report on John McCain’s most recent gaffe: in an interview with Katie Couric, McCain claimed “the surge” was responsible for the “Anbar Awakening” — which actually began in September, 2006, months before the surge was even announced.

The strange thing, as Keith notes, is that CBS edited the gaffe out of its broadcast. Fortunately, they posted a transcript — and video — online.

Once again, John McCain reveals the depth of his foreign policy expertise, and the media demonstrates its clear liberal bias…

But wait, there’s more - John McCain also demonstrates the depth of his commitment to the environment:

And I’d like to mention offshore drilling if I could. My friends, we have to drill offshore. We have to do it! Oil executives say within a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it?

Well, if the oil executives are in favor, that pretty much settles it, right?  I mean, who could possibly be more trustworthy on the subject of offshore drilling?

Add comment July 23rd, 2008 at 07:32am Posted by Eli

Wanker Of The Week

Okay, so he’s not nearly as bad as Michael “Autistic kids are whiny brats” Savage, but Ron Fournier is still pretty heinous:

Last week, we learned that while investigators for the House Oversight Committee were looking into the 2004 death of Cpl. Pat Tillman… they discovered that top political aide Karl Rove had exchanged emails with the Associated Press’ Ron Fournier on the day the news of Tillman’s death broke.

In one email, Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this?” Fournier responded: “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”

(…)

Fournier, now the wire service’s D.C. bureau chief, shrugged off the embarrassing revelation, conceding only: “I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence.”

Of course, Fournier wasn’t simply being breezy. “Have a great weekend” — that’s “breezy.”

(…)

The Fournier revelation came as no surprise to anyone who has read his recent campaign work, which has routinely been caustic and dismissive of Democratic contenders. In two “Analysis” pieces and a column, Fournier questioned whether John Edwards was a “phony,” announced the Clintons suffered from “utter self-absorption,” and claimed that Barack Obama was “bordering on arrogance.” That’s the right of a pundit. But at the same time, Fournier avoided raising any doubts about Sen. John McCain, and in fact rushed to his aid in print during the senator’s time of campaign need.

(…)

Just in case this isn’t perfectly obvious, just in case people might be wondering if it’s common for objective political reporters to email partisan operatives off the record and behind the scenes, urging them to “keep up the fight,” the answer is a resounding no. Because it violates the basic journalistic guideline of maintaining neutrality. Especially at the AP, that kind of correspondence should be considered breathtakingly inappropriate.

Think about it: That year, Rove was engineering the president’s re-election — a campaign Fournier was covering as an AP reporter — and Fournier urged Rove to “keep up the fight”? Even if that phrase was not written in connection with the campaign, that kind of communication is just wrong. If Fournier could produce emails from 2004 in which he urged top Democratic strategists to “keep up the fight,” it would certainly remove doubts about his relationship with Rove, but I suspect Fournier cannot.

(…)

But let’s dig a little deeper: In his attempt to dismiss the Rove correspondence, Fournier said that the exchange came “in the course of following an important and compelling story” while he was an AP political reporter. Meaning Fournier was just doing his job.

Yet according to a search of Nexis, Fournier didn’t write any bylined articles about Pat Tillman’s death in April 2004. Or ever, for that matter. That means Fournier wasn’t reaching out as a reporter to Rove for information, quotes, or context about the sad Tillman story. Fournier didn’t need Rove to be a “source” for the Tillman story because Fournier wasn’t covering the Tillman story.

Instead, Fournier seemed to be using the Tillman story as an opportunity to initiate contact with Rove and let him know that Fournier was on his side, and to urge Rove to “keep up the fight.”

But wait, there’s more!  This is what separates a Wanker Of The Week from a mere Wanker Of The Day:

Warning Clinton during the primaries about the dangers of having a candidate’s character questioned by the press, Fournier noted that Al Gore got unfairly tagged during the 2000 presidential campaign for having claimed to have invented the Internet. Fournier patiently set the record straight, noting that Gore “never said he invented the Internet,” that “his mistake was to place himself more centrally than warranted at the creation of the technology,” and that “such nuance was lost on people who voted against him in 2000.”

Silly voters. But how on earth did they come to the false conclusion that Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet? Answer: By reading Ron Fournier.

• “He [Gore] claimed credit for inventing the Internet, and comics had a punch line for months.” [November 13, 1999]
• “Gore, who once claimed to have invented the Internet, e-mailed Bush and said Democrats won’t air TV ads purchased with unlimited, unregulated donations called ’soft money’ unless Republicans do so first.” [March 15, 2000]

Awesome.  Ron Phonier is a wanker on so many levels.

Add comment July 22nd, 2008 at 09:22pm Posted by Eli

Not Entirely Sure What The Chait Is Going For…

He seems to be saying that yeah, McCain may be just as evil as Dubya, but at least he wouldn’t be an outright criminal if he were president:

The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove. I went back and reread Michael Lewis’s 1997 New York Times Magazine profile of McCain, which gushed (persuasively) over McCain long before McCain- gushing had become a media cliché. You can see in it that, even before his first presidential campaign made him persona non grata in the GOP, McCain really was a highly bipartisan figure. The article cites McCain working unusually closely with Democrats, and quotes Democrats lavishing praise on him. He impugns his own party’s leadership as corrupt. He jokingly refers to his younger political self as a “freshman right-wing Nazi.” Conservative ideologues, as a rule, do not liken conservatism to national socialism.

Liberals tend to view the press’s love affair with McCain as a wildly unfair act of bias. They have a point. On the other hand, they should take some heart in the fact that McCain obviously cherishes the approval of the mainstream (and even liberal) media. His accessibility to the press and public is something small-d democrats should cheer. McCain has conducted interviews with very liberal publications like Grist. He’s promised to undertake an American version of “Prime Minister’s Questions,” whereby members of Congress could spar with him.

Does McCain spin and dissemble? Of course. But the current administration’s practices go far beyond mere spin. In Bush’s Washington, critics are enemies to be dismissed rather than engaged. A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.

Beneath his wildly fluctuating ideological positions, McCain is an establishmentarian Republican. Unlike Bush, he cares about elite opinion. He is comfortable sharing power in the traditional postwar style rather than monopolizing it. He might not be another Teddy Roosevelt, but right now another Gerald Ford doesn’t look so bad.

Sure, another Gerald Ford might not be so bad.  BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT.

What we really need is another FDR, but that ain’t happening.

Add comment July 21st, 2008 at 07:54pm Posted by Eli

They Write Letters

Another frothing-at-the-mouth bleeding-heart liberal heard from on Obama’s FISA cave and the media’s coverage of it:

Re “Obama Supporters on the Far Left Cry Foul” (news article, July 13):

I resent the implication in your article that those of us unhappy with Senator Barack Obama’s vote on wiretapping are a bunch of left-wingnuts.

Support of our Constitution is not a radical position, and it is troubling that the media, including The New York Times, have lately been characterizing such support as such.

I was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but now after his vote to nullify the Fourth Amendment, I am understandably less so. But I am no pinko.

In fact, I consider myself somewhat of a conservative in the former sense of the world. I am opposed to welfare, government bailouts and affirmative action. I’m wary of the military-industrial complex, but I support a strong military. I like the Constitution a lot, and believe in balanced budgets, living within our means and small government, most particularly the kind that doesn’t illegally spy on its citizens.

If these beliefs are “far left,” then I’m George Orwell.

Damn hippies.

2 comments July 20th, 2008 at 07:18pm Posted by Eli

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Tom Friedman is a fatuous twit who helped enable the invasion of Iraq, has been wrong more times that I can count, and is the master of godawful metaphors… but his take on the gasoline crisis is absolutely perfect:

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up.

Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up.

Add comment July 20th, 2008 at 02:50pm Posted by Eli

Wanker Of The Month

Michael Savage/Weiner:

Now, you want me to tell you my opinion on autism, since I’m not talking about autism? A fraud, a racket. For a long while, we were hearing that every minority child had asthma. Why did they sudden — why was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I’ll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], “When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], ‘I don’t know, the dust got me.’ ” See, everyone had asthma from the minority community. That was number one.

Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.

What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.”

Autism — everybody has an illness. If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, “Don’t behave like a fool.” The worst thing he said — “Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.” That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.

Oh. My. God.  So apparently autistic kids are all really just brats and sissies.  Good to know - and be sure to share this revelation with any parents of autistic kids who you might know.  I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.

Add comment July 17th, 2008 at 06:39pm Posted by Eli

More Willful Stupidity

Okay, this is really complicated, so please try to follow along with me here:

Saying that McCain’s military service does not qualify him for the presidency is not the same as saying that it disqualifies him from the presidency.  Nor is it the same as saying that his military service is bogus in any way.

Also, as McCain Source points out, McCain himself agrees with Clark.

But no, saying that getting shot down and taken prisoner and tortured for five years doesn’t qualify you to be president is the same as saying that Kerry lied about his service in Vietnam and shot himself to get a Purple Heart.  Awesome.

Add comment July 1st, 2008 at 08:59am Posted by Eli

Dispatches From Bizarro World

Today’s installment is from one of Bizarro World’s leading citizens, Rush Limbaugh:

You want to know why the Republicans are willing to say, “Screw you,” to 30 percent or more of their voters and yet Democrats will bend over, grab the ankles, and say, “Have your way with me,” for 10 percent and 2 percent of the population [black people and gays]?

(…)

There is an answer to your — basic question is, “Why don’t the Democrats say, ‘To hell with you, you wacko nuts in the base,’ like Republicans do?”

(…)

The — there’s a complicated answer to this… but one of the simple answers that will require some elaboration is that a lot of money is coming from these kooks — and I’m not talking about just the blacks — I’m talking about a whole kook-fringe base because George Soros is running it… and they need the money.

(…)

…[T]he Republican Party, especially as currently constituted, is doing its best to deemphasize the importance or the influence of the traditional conservative base, which is not just the so-called evangelical Christian Right or the pro-lifers or whatever. But you have all kinds of people in the Republican base that are conservatives, from values conservatives, social conservatives, even fiscal economic conservatives. Conservatism has been the base of the Republican Party and because the conservative base does include pro-lifers and because many of them are from the South, there are many in the Northeastern corridors of power in the Republican Party who are embarrassed to be in the party with those people.

(…)

…[T]he politically active gay community on the left is worth a lot of money. These people send the Democrats more money than you can possibly imagine. A lot of it from Hollywood, and the arts and entertainment. They’re not — money — you know, key number one, you might be saying, well, don’t the pro-lifers donate a lot of money to the Republicans? Yeah. Yeah, they do. But it still embarrasses them. It still embarrasses a lot of the country club Rockefeller types.

The Democrats — what are they embarrassed about? They’re not embarrassed about anything. The Democrats have never set any standards for themselves. As far as they’re concerned, everybody’s a victim, even on their side. So, I mean, yeah, these victims are just fighting to be heard. Fighting for their rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The conservative rights — conservative right is viewed as trying to deny people rights, blah, blah, blah, you see.

But in addition to the money aspect of this — and don’t forget, the left-wing base is not even talked about by Mickey Edwards there — is the anti-war kook fringe. And it is huge. From MoveOn.org to Think Progress to My Base Book — whatever these things, these things — well, maybe not MySpace or Face, whatever it is. But, there are so many of these 527 groups out there that are just raising money left and right and the Democrats are scared to death if these people take their money and go away or go to a third party or what have you. And so they will cater to them left and right.

Wow.  That almost makes me wish I lived in Rush Limbaugh’s universe, where Democrats bend over backwards (or, if you’re Rush, forwards) for their progressive base while Republicans tell conservatives to get lost.  Because George Soros and the Hollywood gay community give progressives such a huge money advantage over conservatives, who only have the world of corporations and ultra-rich people to draw from.  Those poor conservatives, they can never get a seat at the table, and progressives are in control of everything.

Which is why the Democratic Congress allows the Iraqupation to continue, and is inches away from passing a FISA revision which gives Dubya all the spying powers and unaccountability for past spying crimes he could have ever wanted.

But other than the clueless reference to “My Base Book,” I think my favorite bit is the part about how huge the “anti-war kook fringe” is.  Well, yeah, it’s huge - about 60-70% of the country are anti-war kooks now.  And they are so totally calling the shots, too.

1 comment June 26th, 2008 at 07:09am Posted by Eli

Richard Cohen, Conventional Wisdom Machine

Ya gotta love Broderella’s Padawan apprentice, Richard Cohen - his ability to uncritically regurgitate conventional wisdom/Republican talking points is truly impressive:

In some recent magazine articles, I and certain of my colleagues have been accused of being soft on McCain, forgiving him his flips, his flops and his mostly conservative ideology. I do not plead guilty to this charge, because, over the years, the man’s imperfections have not escaped my keen eye. But, for the record, let’s recapitulate: McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife’s corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I’ve said it all.

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama — and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That’s why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.

Wow.  So Cohen lists a whole bunch of McCain’s flip-flops that show him to be completely devoid of honor or principles, and then proceeds to rave about McCain’s honor and principles and how we know that there are some lines he will not cross.  I suppose that may be true - for instance, he would probably not feed his wife and daughters to hungry sharks to pick up sympathy votes - but the lines that he has been willing to cross, like war, torture, habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping, depriving servicemen of education and leave time, are all bad enough that they should disqualify him from the presidency.

As for Cohen’s statement about Obama not taking positions that challenge his base… has he been paying any attention at all?  Did he not notice Obama coming out in favor of the FISA compromise that his base absolutely despises?  I can go along with the “or otherwise threaten him politically” part, but I would add the word “knowingly” in there somewhere.  I think his cave-in on FISA does hurt him politically with his base - it’s sucked a lot of enthusiasm out of all but his most die-hard supporters - but I don’t think that was part of his calculation.  So it may have pissed off his base, but it sure as hell was not an act of political courage - quite the opposite, in fact.

Still, as shameless and spineless a triangulator as Obama may be, McCain has repeatedly shown himself to be far, far worse and far, far more dangerous.  And Cohen is a dishonest ass for pretending otherwise.

(h/t bmaz)

1 comment June 24th, 2008 at 07:32am Posted by Eli

This Just In: Don Imus Still Racist

Lovely:

Wolf: “Defensive back Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones, recently signed by the Cowboys. Here’s a guy suspended all of 2007 following a shooting in a Vegas night club.”

Imus: “Well, stuff happens. You’re in a night club, for God’s sake. What do you think’s gonna happen in a night club? People are drinking and doing drugs, there are women there, and people have guns. So, there, go ahead.”

Wolf: “He’s also been arrested six times since being drafted by Tennessee in 2005.”

Imus: “What color is he?”

Wolf: “He’s African-American.”

Imus: “Well, there you go. Now we know.”

Yeah, putting him back on the air was a brilliant move.  He totally learned his lesson and stuff.

(h/t Jason Rosenbaum)

Add comment June 23rd, 2008 at 06:17pm Posted by Eli

Lizzie Bumiller Can’t Quite Bring Herself To Admit That McCain Is Just Like Bush

She gets a lot closer than I ever would have thought possible, though.  She even notes some of his flip-flops, especially on tax cuts, where McCain is actually now worse than Dubya.

The differences, according to Bumiller, are McCain’s opposition to global warming (which is pretty much a cosmetic sham), his opposition to torture (ditto), and the fact that he’s now moved to the right of Bush on immigration.

She also throws in this little gem:

Yet while it would be hard to categorize him as a doctrinaire Republican or conservative, Mr. McCain appears to have ceded some of his carefully cultivated reputation as a maverick.

Actually, it’s very easy to categorize McCain as a doctrinaire Republican or conservative, Lizzie.  Maybe it wasn’t eight years ago, but it sure as hell is now.

And a little bit more:

In a CBS News poll two weeks ago, 43 percent of registered voters said they believed he would continue Mr. Bush’s policies, and 21 percent said he would be more conservative in his policies than Mr. Bush. Twenty-eight percent said he would be less conservative than Mr. Bush.

For those of you keeping score, that’s 64% of registered voters who believe McCain would be either the same as Bush, or farther to the right. Excellent.

Presidencies are about more than policies, of course, and Mr. McCain would bring a different style, background and world view to the White House should he be elected in November.

Style and background, I’ll grant.  But world view?  It’s exactly the same.  Taxes bad, corporations good, we need a strong daddy government that will stop at nothing to protect us from the evildoers.  Fortunately, it looks like the voters are starting to figure that out.

Add comment June 17th, 2008 at 11:39am Posted by Eli

This Just In: Women Not Stupid

Well, it doesn’t sound like McCain’s attempts to woo disgruntled Hillary supporters are really going all that well.  I can’t imagine why not.

TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.

Oops.  I guess most women can tell when they’re being played.

The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.

This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.

(…)

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, wrote this month that Mr. McCain is “incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain ditched the preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley after learning that their endorsements antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he ended up getting a whole new flock of evangelical Christians furious at him too.

The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are planning a large rally for convention week in Minneapolis. The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Mr. Obama, as have both the economic adviser to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Lawrence Hunter, and the neocon historian Francis Fukuyama. Rupert Murdoch is publicly flirting with the Democrat as well. Even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker this month to gratuitously dismiss Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday proposal as “a false notion” before the National Press Club.

These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill reported that at least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Mr. McCain. Congressional Quarterly found that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out to Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have contributed to his putative successor.

(…)

The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.

The October Surprise is going to have to be pretty damn spectacular…

Add comment June 16th, 2008 at 07:04am Posted by Eli

Wanker Of The Day

Bill O’Reilly:

During the June 10 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, purporting to document “more evidence of values problem among American young people,” host Bill O’Reilly reported that seven ninth-graders at Pascack Valley High School in New Jersey have been suspended for distributing topless photographs of their classmates…. O’Reilly… stated: “But it’s an amazing amount of kids involved with this — 20 — in an affluent school district. This isn’t, you know, the inner city; you would think that these kids would have some kind of a values system.” O’Reilly continued: “It’s not that it’s so horrendous. You know, it’s not murder or rape. But it’s so stupid.”

Yes, apparently inner-city kids have no values system whatsoever, and O’Reilly is shocked by the idea that rich white kids could behave immorally or idiotically.  Because that never happens.

Add comment June 12th, 2008 at 07:21am Posted by Eli

Playing The Age Card

Well, it looks like this is something to look forward: Any time a Democrat says that McCain literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the media, Republicans and the McCain campaign are going to cry ageism:

I can appreciate the fact that the McCain campaign and Republicans in general are a little touchy about the senator’s age — running to be the oldest president in U.S. history will do that — but that’s no reason to characterize every critical adjective in the language as some kind of slight about McCain’s septuagenarian status.

Poll after poll shows that more voters trust Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on matters of national security than they do Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois. Hoping to bridge that chasm, the Obama campaign and Democrats harped on comments McCain made on the Today show this morning, repeatedly calling the 71-year-old presumptive GOP presidential nominee “confused,” seeming to feed into concerns voters might have about the Arizonan’s age.

After McCain said this morning that it’s “not too important” when U.S. troops come home from Iraq, Obama aide Susan Rice said on a conference call that McCain’s comments reveal a “real confusion and lack of understanding of the situation in Iraq” and the larger region. She added that McCain’s series of errors of fact and judgment are “reflective of a pattern of lack of understanding and lack of strategic depth.”

Reporters, apparently having internalized McCain’s talking points, asked Rice if she was attacking McCain’s age by calling him “confused.” She responded, “[W]hat I meant by that is very simple — on critical, factual questions that are fundamental to understanding what’s going on in Iraq and the region, Sen. McCain has gotten it wrong. And not just once but repeatedly.”

This comes a month after Obama, responding to an ugly attack by McCain about Hamas, told CNN, “[F]or him to toss out comments like that I think is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination.” McCain, Lieberman, and their GOP allies said this was a shot at McCain’s age.

Look, this is silly. Every criticism is not a veiled reference to McCain turning 72. “Losing his bearings” has nothing to do with age — it refers to someone who has lost their way. They’re off track. They’re moving in the wrong direction. Likewise, people of all ages get “confused.”

Maybe McCain and the media can draw up a list of acceptable adjectives that McCain critics can use?

(…)

Tell you what, reporters and McCain campaign, pick a better adjective for us. “Confused” sounds like an attack on his age? Fine. You tell me. Befuddled? Bewildered? Baffled?

The problem isn’t that McCain’s critics are picking loaded terms; the problem is McCain doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about when it comes to his signature issue.

Why we’re not supposed to mention this is a mystery. I guess I’m confused.

Of course, it’s not about word choice, it’s about making Democrats afraid to point out that McCain is either lying, stupid, or flat-out crazy, which he often is.  Take that line of attack away, and what do we have left?

Add comment June 11th, 2008 at 08:46pm Posted by Eli

This Just In

Apparently journalistic standards apply to everyone except journalists.

Okay, I may be using the word a little loosely…

Add comment June 10th, 2008 at 10:50pm Posted by Eli

In Soviet America, Media Censors YOU!

(If the conservatives can call us fascists, then surely we can call them communists)

Here’s a paragraph from an NYT editorial on media censorship in Russia. Does it sound a little… familiar?

Equally insidious as government censorship is the growing self-censorship among Russian journalists. The fear, mostly of losing their jobs, is especially true at national television networks, where most Russians get their information. News about Chechnya or Georgia or Iran now follows the government line. Mr. Putin’s opponents or Mr. Medvedev’s critics are viewed as un-newsworthy, and public affairs shows on Russian television are growing more like those in the Soviet days when “news” meant reading a handout from the Kremlin.

It’s downright uncanny.

Add comment June 9th, 2008 at 09:45pm Posted by Eli

I May Have Just Coined A New Word

Pwnography.

It’s like Schadenfreude, only dirtier.

Add comment June 8th, 2008 at 11:52pm Posted by Eli

You Keep Using That Word…

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Wanker Of The Day, “feminist” Marc Rudov on The O’Reilly Factor:

O’REILLY: I believe the reason women go to see [the Sex & The City] movie… are because of the clothes, the shoes, the gossiping about men and the overall tone of dish, D-I-S-H. That’s why they go. I don’t think very many American women identify with these four.

RUDOV: Oh, come on, Bill. You have to be kidding. That’s exactly what women do, and that’s why they would see themselves in this movie. And that’s exactly why men would not go see it, because paying to hear women whine is as stupid as paying for cobwebs, because you can get them both at home for free….

(…)

I don’t tolerate this. This movie is the cinematic equivalent to ipecac. It’s Woodstock for entitled princesses.

(…)

O’REILLY: Look, most American women are not entitled princesses. They’re not.

RUDOV: Oh, yes they are, Bill.

O’REILLY: This is — no, no, no. This is an ur–

RUDOV: Oh, yes they are.

(…)

O’REILLY: You believe that most American women are as shallow as those four?

HOOVER: No, no, no.

RUDOV: I do.

Okay, Marc, I think you may be a little bit confused about the word “feminist” - it’s not like “sexist” or “racist,” you know that, right?  It actually means someone who’s pro-women, someone who believes women are the equals of men, and entitled to all the same rights, privileges and respect.

It’s an easy mistake to make, I suppose.

Add comment June 2nd, 2008 at 09:40pm Posted by Eli

MoDo Has One Of Her Good Days

Yes, more of this and less “Obambi,” please:

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

(…)

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

(…)

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.

(…)

McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.

“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.

“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.

MoDo is exactly right.  None of these people (she also mentions Tenet and Powell’s conspicuously late revelations) are motivated by conscience; if they were, they would have resigned and spoken out when they realized that their boss was an amoral lying liar arrogantly leading the country down the path to ruin.

Instead, they waited until they were personally aggrieved and/or saw the potential for dollar signs, thus tainting the credibility of their almost-certainly-truthful revelations.  Instead of being a cry of conscience howled shortly after his “breaking point,” Scottie’s memoir looks more like an exercise in paying back and cashing in, allowing Dubya’s minions to attack his motivations instead of refuting his accusations (except for the sensational but largely irrelevant cocaine story).

3 comments June 1st, 2008 at 01:53pm Posted by Eli

I Wonder What It Was Like…

To be Landay & Strobel in the early days of BushCo’s drumbeating for the Iraq invasion.  I figure that at first they must have been racing to get their stories out, afraid that some other news organization would beat them to the explosive scoop: White House Lying About Case For War!

And then, gradually, realizing that they weren’t actually racing against anybody.  No-one was trying to beat them to the story, no-one else wanted anything to do with it.  I wonder if they doubted their own sanity a little bit, the way that you do when you’re the only person who sees something, or thinks a certain way.  Hell, I wonder if either one of them could have sustained it alone, without someone else to reassure him that they were seeing the same things, that he wasn’t deluding himself and chasing shadows.

How sad is that, really?  The biggest story of the decade, and nobody wanted to cover it.

Add comment May 30th, 2008 at 10:18pm Posted by Eli

Vindication!

For over three years, I have been saying that the media isn’t pro-Republican because of incompetence or right-wing intimidation or even a mindless quest for ratings, but because it’s what their corporate ownership wants. Well, Jessica Yellin just confirmed it on Anderson Cooper 360:

COOPER: Jessica, [former White House press secretary Scott] McClellan took press to task for not upholding their reputation. He writes: “The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The ‘liberal media’ — in quotes — didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Dan Bartlett, former Bush adviser, called the allegation “total crap.”

What is your take? Did the press corps drop the ball?

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn’t go that far.

I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives — and I was not at this network at the time — but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

(…)

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact — they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

There you have it.  It’s not bad or lazy or timid reporting; the editorial direction is actually coming from corporate and news executives who are actively promoting a pro-Republican bias.  The good news is that stories like McClellan’s and Yellin’s are seeping out, on top of the propaganda generals and Tim Russert’s role as a safe haven for White House talking points.

All of this erodes the corporate media’s credibility as objective, much less liberal, news sources - which will hopefully lead to more and more people seeking out alternatives.  We’ll be here, waiting.

1 comment May 29th, 2008 at 08:37pm Posted by Eli

Incurious Howie

I meant to touch on this yesterday, but couldn’t find the time.  Howie Kurtz has a piece in which he very sympathetically covers Republican accusations that MSNBC is too liberal (and Clinton campaign accusations that it’s too Pro-bama):

MSNBC, which bills itself as “the place for politics,” is being pummeled by political practitioners.

“It’s an organ of the Democratic National Committee,” says Steve Schmidt, a senior strategist for John McCain’s campaign. “It’s a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain.”

Ed Gillespie, President Bush’s counselor, says there is an “increasing blurring” of the line between NBC News and MSNBC’s “blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann.”

Terry McAuliffe, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says Matthews has been “in the tank” for Barack Obama “from Day One” and is practically “the Obama campaign chair.”

Why are operatives from across the political spectrum suddenly beating up on the third-place cable channel? Phil Griffin, the NBC senior vice president who runs MSNBC, dismisses the criticism, calling Schmidt’s broadsides “pretty outrageous accusations.”

“To call us an arm of the DNC is a joke,” he says. “We have people with multiple points of view. Everyone is getting a little thin-skinned. We argue and debate every topic.”

The focus of the attacks is MSNBC’s evening lineup, where the channel has clearly gravitated to the left in recent years and often seems to regard itself as the antithesis of Fox News. Schmidt, for instance, says he regards MSNBC’s daytime reporting as fair, but that it would be “delusional” to view its nighttime operation as anything other than a “partisan entity.”

(…)

NBC News President Steve Capus says the distinctions between reporting and opinion are clear. “We happen to have programs that at times are driven by opinion on MSNBC, and we have a worldwide news organization driven by NBC News,” he says. “The only people trying to lump it all together are people who tend to view these things through a political filter or are our competitors.”

But news and opinion often seem to merge on primary nights. MSNBC’s coverage is anchored by Matthews, a onetime Democratic operative, and Olbermann, the “Countdown” host who recently finished one anti-Bush commentary by instructing the president to “shut the hell up.”

Oh, I see.  Because Matthews is “a onetime Democratic operative,” that makes him a liberal?  He does call Republicans out on obvious bullshit, but his embarrassing man-crushes on Dubya and Mitt Romney make the idea that he’s a liberal simply laughable.  And I don’t think he’s Pro-bama so much as just ridiculously misogynistic.  As for Olbermann being a liberal, well… yeah.

But here’s the bit that struck me as intriguing, but apparently not Howie:

NBC executives say the ratings growth at MSNBC — up 61 percent this month in prime time, compared with a year ago — has made it a target.

Huh.  61% seems like a pretty big increase to me.  Funny that Howie chooses not to explore that growth at all.  Could it be that MSNBC is attracting viewers who don’t want all-GOP-talking-points, all the time?  It certainly seems like there should be a market for a news channel like that, especially as those GOP talking points get more shrill and less credible.

Now that would have made an interesting story.

2 comments May 29th, 2008 at 07:42pm Posted by Eli

Your Objective Media

I found this while looking for something completely different.  I wish I could say it was surprising…

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich drops a little aside in a blog post on campaign styles that gives a revealing, behind-the-scenes glimpse of what passes for political discourse these days. We know the producers of the Sunday talk shows and “reality” shows generally are lurking in the background, egging on the actors and often distorting what’s happening. Rarely do we get to find out about it, however. Reality-show contestants sign contracts not to spill the beans, and talk-show guests also are silent because they know they won’t be invited back if they squeal. Here’s Reich:

I was on television recently, debating a conservative. It’s something I do fairly often. During a commercial break, the producer spoke into my earpiece. “A bit more energy,” he said.”What do you mean?” I answered, slightly hurt. I thought I’d been doing a fairly good job scoring points.

“Rip into him. Only three minutes in the next segment and we want to make the most of it.”…

I asked the producer who was talking into my earpiece why I had to rip into my opponent. “We see viewership minute by minute,” he said, hurriedly (the commercial break was about over). “When you really go after each other, we get a spike.”

It’s the spike I’m worried about. I chose not to rip into my opponent but, then again, I’m not running for president.

This is the larger point to be made about right-wing blowbag Kevin James’ embarrassing appearance on Hardball last week. Sure he made a total fool of himself because he was indignantly against “appeasement” but didn’t know who Neville Chamberlain was or how appeasement got such a bad rap. But, hey, who cares? Hardball’s Chris Matthews “ripped into him.” Matthews and James “got a huge spike.” Isn’t that what matters most? The hell with substance! We want to be entertained. Making himself a global joke was probably a great career move for James.

In case anyone was wondering why the discourse in this country has degenerated into yelling and namecalling.  What’s even more outrageous is that these same media then turn around and bemoan the loss of civility (primarily among Democrats, of course) that they themselves have promoted. Brilliant.

2 comments May 25th, 2008 at 12:06pm Posted by Eli

You Realize, Of Course, That This Means War.

Obama has thrown down the gauntlet:

Democrat Barack Obama said on Sunday he would pursue a vigorous antitrust policy if he becomes U.S. president and singled out the media industry as one area where government regulators would need to be watchful as consolidation increases.

“I will assure that we will have an antitrust division that is serious about pursuing cases,” the Illinois senator told an audience of mostly senior citizens in Oregon.

“There are going to be areas, in the media for example where we’re seeing more and more consolidation, that I think (it) is legitimate to ask…is the consumer being served?”

Yowza.  This is potentially an enormous deal if Obama follows through on it… and if the media’s inevitable all-out war against him doesn’t keep him out of the White House.  Of course, less consolidated media is no guarantee of less conservative media - if wealthy progressives don’t take advantage, we’ll just end up with media owned by more and smaller wingnuts.

The other aspect of this that is interesting and potentially huge is what happens if the media does launch the all-out attack on Obama that I think they will.  The best-case scenario is that Obama starts punching back, pointing out the media’s corporate ownership and questioning their credibility.  Sure, other Democrats could do the same, but only a presidential candidate’s utterances are automatically newsworthy enough to be reported even when they are, shall we say… inconvenient.

As great as unconsolidating the media could be, damaging their credibility might be even more valuable in the short run.  I would much rather have voters saying, “Yeah, the media says Obama is an America-hating, racist Muslim black nationalist, but consider the source,” as opposed to, “It must be true, I saw it on the teevee!”

As for the worst case, well, can you say “YEEEAAARRRGGGHHHH”?  Or “earth tones”?

(h/t Scarecrow)

2 comments May 19th, 2008 at 10:48pm Posted by Eli

Is More But Not Better Worse?

Carl Hulse points out an intriguing (and frustrating) Dem dilemma:

While much of the Congressional political focus has been on the declining fortunes and numbers of House Republicans, House Democrats have their own problem: They are winning too many elections.

By prevailing in conservative districts where they ordinarily would not have a chance, Democrats are widening the ideological divide in their own ranks and complicating their ability to find internal consensus. It is a nice problem to have, but it is one that can bedevil party leaders. As their numbers expand, they have to juggle the competing interests of Travis Childers, the newly elected pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-tax representative from northern Mississippi and someone like, say, Nancy Pelosi, a pro-gun control, liberal abortion-rights advocate from San Francisco who sees government as a solution.

(…)

[T]he strain of balancing the political imperatives of a right-of-center to pretty far left-of-center caucus has already strained the Democratic majority in the House. In the most recent example, the party’s intricate scheme for passing a war spending bill collapsed Thursday when most Republicans sat out the war money vote and most Democrats, who oppose spending more money on combat in Iraq, voted against it.

That left the Democratic majority without the votes to pass a spending bill that, in the leadership’s calculation, is essential to protecting the party’s image on national security as well as members from conservative districts who cannot afford to be seen as failing to support troops in the field. Most of those lawmakers, including many freshmen, backed the war funds.

(…)

Democrats elected themselves into this situation. In picking up 30 seats in 2006, Democrats walked away with some in Republican territory, with the result that many of the newcomers are representing districts where the voters are not completely in sync with the Democratic agenda.

As Howie Klein points out, this is not an entirely accurate representation of the Congressional dynamic:

The Democratic freshmen– of all ideological stripes– voted in greater proportions against the war than the Democratic caucus as a whole did.

However, there are a whole bunch of reliably unreliable freshmen Democrats, including the two special election winners now in office, who voted in favor of the war funding, and who will probably vote with the Republicans most of the time.

In addition to being a tactical problem - how to hold the Democratic caucus together and pass legislation when a giant chunk of it votes with the Republicans - this is also an optical problem.  The more Democrats there are in Congress, the more results Americans will expect to see.  If progressive initiatives are consistently sabotaged by the Blue Dog caucus, and Republican business as usual continues, voter frustration with the Democrats will increase and support for the Democrats will collapse.

Indeed, I believe that Democratic gains in this November’s elections will be far more due to disgust with Republicans and failed Bush policies than any kind of esteem for the Democrats.  If the Bush Dogs are able to hold the party hostage, the Naderite meme that there’s no difference between the parties will take hold once again, and 2010 and 2012 will be disasters.

I think the bottom line is that however many seats Democrats pick up, they need to have a core voting majority of progressives, or at least of non-Bush Dogs.  I’m not sure that that’s going to happen this cycle, or next.  But if we can run strong progressive challengers to some of the worse Bush Dogs, and/or the ones in safely Democratic seats, then maybe we can funnel some of that voter discontent to our advantage.

(h/t Stoller)

2 comments May 19th, 2008 at 07:22am Posted by Eli

Welcome To The 2008 Campaign Metanarrative

I think the #1 story - and deciding factor - of the 2008 campaign is going to be the efforts of McCain and downticket Republican candidates to distance themselves from the unpopular awfulness of the Bush/Cheney administration and position themselves as Reasonable Pragmatic Moderates.

Dick Morris thinks it’s doable, at least for Straight-Talking Maverick McCain:

McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he’s not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive?

I wasn’t aware that one did.

…McCain can win by running to the center.

His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn’t a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

(…)

Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don’t like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.

(…)

….Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think….

Right, because Dubya hasn’t been doing that at all for the past four years.

Bush can help McCain, but that doesn’t mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush’s warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush’s spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush’s.

Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama’s liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act — as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground — will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain’s other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:

[Laundry list of things that McCain will mostly never do, but might conceivably pretend to have intentions of doing]

(…)

Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn’t need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much….

Wow, Dick really has put all his eggs into the racism/Reverend Wright basket, hasn’t he?  And he obviously wants us to believe that McCain really is as honorable and independent as he pretends to be.

Frank Rich doesn’t think it’ll work:

The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.

Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford. As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi elected a Democrat [by eight points] in a Congressional district that went for Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago. It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special election since March.

(…)

The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold. “We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis. Well, he got out the vote all right. In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47 percent.

(…)

The McCain campaign is hoping that… showy, if tardy, departures from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on…” and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.” Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies.

(…)

But are independents suckers? They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate in his own party in 2008. He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004. Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. He is still one of the president’s most stalwart supporters in Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of an expansion of children’s health insurance.

(…)

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well as Fox News. Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings in the party’s bad news. His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.

And what of the loyal base that Dick Morris doesn’t think the Republicans have to worry about?  Check out the comments on this NRCC blog post where Tom Cole hypes the rollout of a kinder, gentler Republican Party.  They uniformly bemoan the sellout big-government liberalism and vow to stop contributing and stay home on Election Day.

So this is the dilemma that McCain and the Republicans face: How do they thread the needle between pretending that they have absolutely nothing in common with Dubya, nope, never heard of him, and pissing off the die-hard conservative base that is completely unaccustomed to not being pandered to? Even with the corporate media’s unstinting assistance, I don’t think it can be done - not if American voters still have functioning memories.

I’m looking forward to watching the Republicans alienate both the independents and the base for a truly epic implosion.  And if Bob Barr really does end up running to siphon off the crazy base vote, McCain will have absolutely zero chance.

(h/t dakine, Mike Stark, & Julia)

2 comments May 18th, 2008 at 02:13pm Posted by Eli

Great Moments In Campaign Journalism

This… is a joke, right?

Now that the presidential contest is looking ever more like a two-man race, the country can’t help but marvel: John McCain, once a longshot, wouldn’t lie down. Barack Obama, the new kid, charmed voters. And Hillary Rodham Clinton, an early favorite, has yet to surrender.

But Arlyn J. Imberman would say clues to the nomination fight were in plain sight, every time a candidate wrote a thank-you note, inscribed a memoir or autographed a pair of boxing gloves.

“Obama is very much his writing — fluid, graceful. McCain’s is angular and intense; he’s a pit bull. And look at the perfectionism in Hillary’s — straight up, precise. She is persistent and is not going to give up until she absolutely has to,” said Imberman, a court-certified graphologist based in New York.

Presidential signatures are trademarks that grace everything from historic documents to the souvenir M&M’s boxes handed out on Air Force One. And history suggests penmanship can reflect personality.

Abraham Lincoln set 3 million slaves free with a signature that was as modest and unadorned as he was. Ronald Reagan — the “great communicator” — penned rounded letters that radiated warmth. Jimmy Carter etched an autograph that was aloof and cerebral. And Richard Nixon, who entered the White House with a big, bold R and N, left in deflated disgrace, his signature collapsing as well.

Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign suffered when it was revealed that he had changed his signature several times over the years. “Who is Gary Hart?” his rivals demanded.

“Our handwriting is uniquely ours; an imprint as singular as a fingerprint,” Imberman asserted in a book she recently co-wrote, “Signature for Success” (in which, by the way, she concluded that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a gender role reversal going).

(…)

Despite vast policy differences, McCain and Obama have something in common signature-wise — illegibility, which suggests a need for privacy or an aversion to transparency.

In McCain’s case, that desire can be seen further in his H, which is not a loop, but an upward stroke overlapped by a downward one. “There is a lot about John McCain he doesn’t wish to share openly,” said Roger Rubin, a New York graphologist with three decades of experience.

“When you cover a stroke, it means you are hiding something,” Rubin said.

Both men’s signatures also reflect a desire to distance themselves from their fathers, the experts said.

The LA Times couldn’t find anything else to write about?  Really?

(h/t Elliott)

3 comments May 13th, 2008 at 07:15am Posted by Eli

Monday Media Blogging, Part Deux

Bill O’Reilly completely flips out, back in his Inside Edition days.

He is sooo not stable.

…Aaaand YouTube has pulled it.  Crooks & Liars to the rescue!

(h/t JulianWan, by way of Brandon Friedman)

Add comment May 12th, 2008 at 11:53am Posted by Eli

This Is Not Your Father’s Presidential Election

Frank Rich has an interesting perspective on this year’s election, and why it looks promising for Obama:

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence….

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

(…)

[T]his isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

…[E]ven if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

Rich is more optimistic than I am about the diminished impact of smear campaigns - I think they will always be effective unless countered decisively and authoritatively (indeed, Kerry’s passive reaction to the Swift Boaters might have been more damaging than the smears themselves).

But overall, I think he’s onto something important: America hates Bush like they’ve never hated any president before.  Nixon might have come close, but he was already two years out of office by Election Day.  Dubya will still be there, and he’ll still be trying to throw his weight around to prove how relevant he is.  If Obama can effectively tie McCain to Dubya and his most unpopular policies, he should win in a landslide.

The good news is that McCain has given Obama plenty of ammunition; the bad news is that the corporate media will be doing all they can to debunk and “fact-check” him at every turn.  My hope is that the media overplay their hand and end up discrediting themselves instead of Obama - because without the media, the Republicans have nothing.

Add comment May 11th, 2008 at 11:58am Posted by Eli

Your Impartial Liberal Media

Look what Mike Caulfield found in the CNBC Store.

I assume they had lots of anti-McCain novelty items there as well, right?

Right?

Add comment May 5th, 2008 at 11:36pm Posted by Eli