David Gregory Campaigning for 8-Figure Salary

I've never been impressed with David Gregory's reporting which says something about the times because I consider him one of the better big name reporters of this era. It's a pathetic era for journalism and most of the finest journalism in the last five years has been by reporters who are considerably less well-paid than network darlings like David Gregory. In other words, the finest reporting has often been by people who are not big names (feel free to list in the comments section some of the better known reporters who manage to do a fine job). One of the ironies about David Gregory is that he is not well-liked by the right or well-liked by the left. Somehow that seems to make him, what?, an even-handed reporter?

But the reality of network and cable news is that nobody watches you unless you're controversial. Perhaps David Gregory figures his chances for a good eight figure salary will come if he utters ridiculous points on the news.

Think Progress has a David Gregory gem from the Chris Matthews show:

On the Chris Matthews Show this morning, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory said that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will need to have “her ‘Sister Souljah’ moment” and distance herself from the “hatred over Iraq” on “the left.”

“The left” needs to “think about how they’re going to engage the war on terror in a very serious and tough way,” said Gregory.

(snip)

...68 percent of Americans support withdrawal from Iraq within a year.

David Gregory's stereotypes about those who oppose Bush's fiasco in Iraq don't help the debate. In fact, it makes Gregory look rather uninformed. President Bush has, in fact, united rational conservatives, moderates (real moderates not the network faux brand), liberals and even people to the left of this blogger (I'm a liberal Democrat who traces his beliefs to FDR, Truman and Kennedy). A majority of Americans are disgusted with the fiasco in Iraq and Bush's arrogant, incompetent and stubborn behavior. That's really not too difficult to understand, not even for a reporter.

So many Washington reporters and pundits have made gaffes in the last five years that I usually leave it to other bloggers to cover them. It's a fulltime job to keep up with the nonsense coming out of Washington that tries to pass itself off as 'conventional wisdom.'

Our nation, however, is in constitutional crisis, and David Gregory is either in denial or too busy working on that eight figure salary. And it's not Gregory's only offense in the last month.

Last month, Gregory interviewed Elizabeth Edwards and made some bizarre assertions as he interviewed her; here's the story from Americablog:

... According to NBC's David Gregory we're all missing the very important points that Ann Coulter makes because we get caught up in her hate speech. He just said to Elizabeth Edwards "if you strip away some of the inflammatory rhetoric against your husband and other Democrats, the point she's trying to make about your husband, Senator Edwards, running for the White House is in effect that he's disingenuous..."

Okay, so much wrong with the way Gregory defends Coulter. Her hateful, inflammatory rhetoric can't be stripped away -- and let's be honest, that's why NBC and ABC put her on their t.v. shows. In typical fashion, he also tries to paint everyone with the same kind of hate speech. So, instead of putting Coulter on, NBC now has one of their top reporters defending her approach. Because, you know, if you strip away the fact that Coulter advocated the assassination of a leading presidential candidate, and mocked his dead son, there's really such an important message buried inside.

Huh? Says so much.

Elizabeth Edwards handled it well, pretty much laughing at him -- and made the key point -- this is not about stripping away hateful rhetoric. The hate speech is the issue. ...

Both Think Progress and Americablog have video of David Gregory making his ridiculous assertions. Click on the links and they'll take you to the videos. Seeing and hearing is believing. It's just a shame that the process of pointing out poor news reporting may help Gregory reach that eight figure salary. But these are, of course, absurd times.

Jules Witcover on George W. Bush

Veteran reporter, Jules Witcover, is, among other things, a student of the Nixon era and was one of the first to notice the Nixonian qualities of Bush and his inner circle, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld. Recently he wrote a book on the strange relationship between Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon; here's a review from Charles Trueheart of Bloomberg:

What neither Nixon nor Agnew could have imagined, as Jules Witcover tells us in his highly readable new account, ``Very Strange Bedfellows,'' is that within five years the two would become ``the only case in American political history of back-to- back political suicides of a vice president and the president under whom he served.''

Witcover is a seasoned political columnist who has been fascinated by the bizarre Agnew case from the outset. The tale remains engrossing to this day. He's especially keen-eyed about the lack of chemistry between the two men, who didn't know each other before and, thanks to Nixon's pathological discomfort with his fellow human beings, never got past formalities.

Yet somehow Agnew, an intellectual and political pipsqueak, appealed to Nixon's insecurities. ``[Nixon] seemed to question his own manliness and was overly impressed by big, handsome, and commanding males, almost to the point of envy for their presence, their confidence, and their easy assertiveness,'' Witcover says.

To be honest, the above sounds more like Blair's relationship to Bush; Tony Blair was more than happy to have President Bush's star power rub off on him. But Bush has real insecurities like Nixon did, though they are of a different type and have more to do with a fundamental lack of ability to understand the world or the purpose of government; Bush often uses P.R. to cover up his inadequacies but he also is obsessed with political gamemanship and executive power in exactly the same way as Nixon was. And Bush's relationship with his father is as strange and neurotic as anything we ever saw with Nixon. Without the senior Bush, junior would never have been president and deep down he knows it. And his staff knows it and are often behind the pathetic comparisons of Bush to other presidents and even to Winston Churchill.

I'm glad to see Jules Witcover doing well. He was one of those reporters early on who criticized President Bush as well as his war in Iraq. He had a regular column in the Baltimore Sun but apparently was let go during budget cuts; one suspects the political hysteria of four years ago might have had something to do with Witcover losing his column and job.

As the failure of the Bush presidency becomes more apparent, it seems we're hearing a little more reality in our newspapers these days; the print media, as is often the case, are considerable ahead of the TV news, particularly the cable guys. Truthout has a recent New York Times column by Jules Witcover on Bush and the challenges facing the next president:

More than three decades ago, Nixon White House Counsel John Dean called the Watergate cover-up "a cancer on the presidency." Another one exists today, posing a challenge for the next president to restore the office as a credible voice in foreign policy.

President Bush's detour in Iraq off the multilateral track adhered to throughout the Cold War years has caused a deep drop in American prestige abroad, requiring extensive repair by his successor regardless of which party wins in 2008.

While Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the immediate trigger for the decline of American influence, just as significant was his original failure to capitalize on the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to mobilize a truly collective global response.

Jules Witcover is nobody's network poodle earning seven figures; he's a pro. Give him a read.

The Greatest Danger to America

The greatest danger to America is not al Qaida or radical Islam or even terrorism. The greatest threat is an increasingly dysfunctional government. A dysfunctional government cannot deal effectively with terrorism or any of the other important issues facing our nation.

One of the Republican mythologies that has too often gone unchallenged in the last twenty years is the notion that Ronald Reagan 'defeated' the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a serious adversary at the height of its power but it was never the hysterical threat that fearful right wingers made it out to be. The hysteria of the right was even noted by President Eisenhower who observed the coincidence of the growing economic and political interests of America's defense industry which clearly benefited from that hysteria (there used to be jokes in Washington about how that hysteria was most obvious at budget time).

The CIA did several studies of the Soviet Union in the decades that followed World War Two. One of the things that became apparent were the many ethnic, political and economic contradictions of the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s, before Reagan in other words, the CIA predicted that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse because of its internal contradictions. Two of the things that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union were rampant corruption and incompetence. The incompetence was to some extent a direct result of the ideological rigidity of the leadership of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union had less to do with communism than the rigidity which made it nearly impossible to react to changing conditions. In contrast, look at China, which technically is still led by a communist party. After the disasters of the 1950s and 1960s, the pragmatists in China finally gained control and China has become an economic juggernaut, largely because it left its ideology behind in favor of far more realistic and workable policies. There is much that is wrong in China and it's possible that the contradictions that still exist in China, contradictions that the leadership continues to ignore, may eventually undo the gains of recent decades. For one thing, China is having its own problems with corruption. And that too is a lesson for the United States.

The media is still largely asleep about the real dangers that face the United States. In the case of Fox News, of course, we have a media outlet that directly contributes to our own internal contradictions. Fox News legitimizes neoconservative foreign policy fantasies about regime change, it legitimizes hate speech, and it legitimizes business interests who distort scientific research in areas such as global warming, pollution, health, tobacco and so on as a way of avoiding dealing with the changing conditions of the world. The Washington Post is a serious news outlet but it has been sluggish in recent years when it comes to holding President Bush and his advisers accountable despite their recklessness and incompetence and increasingly obvious corruption. Here's The Washington Post's editorial from Friday (via Truthout):

It doesn't much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department's legal views. It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department. That is why Mr. Bush's response to questions about the program yesterday was so inadequate.

(snip)

These are important topics for public discussion, and if anyone doubts that they can safely be discussed in public, they need look no further than Mr. Comey's testimony. Instead of doing so, Mr. Bush wants to short-circuit that discussion by invoking the continuing danger of al-Qaeda.

"And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress," Mr. Bush assured the country yesterday, as he brushed off requests for a more detailed account. But this is exactly the point of contention. The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Even by the standards of The Washington Post, the editorial is timid but it is at least a step in the right direction. The Washington Post editors have been sluggish about recognizing the scandals and corruption of the White House and Republican Congress. We have, in fact, reached a point where no charge made against the Bush Administration can automatically be dismissed as absurd. That is how bad things have gotten.

One of the most dangerous things Bush has done in the last six years is stuff his administration with people who are not merely loyal but all too often spectacularly incompetent. And too often corrupt. A nation that cannot adapt to the changes that are swiftly beginning to impact it is a nation that is heading for serious trouble.

It is still a fact that the United States is a great nation but there is a real danger of that greatness becoming Republican mythology if we do not protect our democratic institutions along with the pragmatism that came out of those institutions and thereby became an integral part of our economy, science and law. Al Qaida is a problem that must be dealt with—competently. But the reality is that the biggest threat to our country is a dysfunctional government that is crippled by ideological rigidity, fear-mongering, corruption and incompetence.

Hungering for News and Perspective

I stopped reading Joe Klein years ago. It was nothing personal. I simply got to the point where I knew what he was going to say and I noticed that he didn't add much to the knowledge that I already had about things. The same is true about Time and Newsweek, though I should add that as both magazines drifted to the right, I found them less and less reliable in their general understanding of the issues facing our nation. Ironically, I found US News and World Report more reliable because it made no pretense that it was anything other than a conservative magazine.

But let me go further on Time and Newsweek. Decades ago, when both magazines had a reputation of being more moderate or even mildly liberal at times, I read them closely during the Vietnam War just as I read the Los Angeles Times and watched the nightly news. I can still remember some of the details of a number of the battles, bombing raids and the byzantine merry-go-round that passed for politics in Saigon (and how much more Iraqi politicians are resembling them these days!). After some years, I noticed nothing much new was being added to my knowledge and I cut back my reading on Vietnam and, feeling I needed some perspective, I started reading about World War I and World War II. I encountered a lot of material that started to affect how I saw Vietnam, largely because the material gave me a fresh perspective. After the Vietnam War, I was like a lot of Americans; I got busy and forgot about Vietnam for a bit, but not all that long. I started reading books on Vietnam that I should have read years earlier but, reading them, I found I had a whole different perspective that came from my reading of other wars. I mention these tedious details to point out that some of us evolve, our positions begin to change, we begin to see things very differently over time. Some of us even take the trouble to deepen our knowledge. My problem with a lot of Washington media is that not much changes in the period of two or three or four years except career-oriented herd movements. And my discomfort is not entirely about Republicans or Democrats. I'm frankly tired of listening to Richard Carville though I still like the guy.

Let me turn to something Glenn Greenwald wrote on Friday about Joe Klein:

Time Magazine's Joe Klein at a May 5 Annapolis Book Festival, broadcast on C-SPAN (h/t reader CG):

I am really getting sick and tired of people bashing the press all the time.

It used to be that people like me would get bashed from the right, and now there is the whole blogosphere bashing us as well.

Look, at this point, we're pretty well battered. We're losing advertising revenue.

And unless we can actually have the revenue to go out there and the credibility to report these issues, all of these right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and the left-wing bloggers who are parasites on our reporting, are going to have nothing to do but sit home and twiddle their thumbs and opine about things they have no data for.

Apparently, things were fine -- and the Joe Kleins were perfectly content -- when they were getting viciously attacked and mauled every day by Rush Limbaugh and the right. But matters became intolerable once left-wing bloggers started criticizing the press. That is when things just went too far.

I'm almost too dumbfounded by Klein's remarks to know what to say. It takes an enormous ego to consider himself that self-important. I started searching the internet because I wasn't finding news. I started posting on message boards like thousands of others because there was real fundamental bullshit going on in 2002 and 2003 and most of the media was completely missing the story, 'news' I think they call it. The Guardian, the BBC, some Canadian papers, the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau were on the trail of numerous stories that were ignored by America's mainstream media. Thousands of us were sending these stories to one another by way of message boards and then, later, by way of blogs.

Now back then, even The Washington Post and The New York Times on occassion had stories in their back pages that I thought somebody, anybody would talk about on the nightly news, or cable shows, or PBS. All too often there was nothing. There was silence. There was no followup, though there turned out to be reams of material that would eventually be written and that proved accurate and that many big-name journalists completely missed. This wasn't my first experience of this nonsense. In the 1980s, I heard from people that there was trouble in El Salvador, that there were death squads roaming the rural areas. I'm nobody but I'm generally skeptical by nature and I was struck by the feeling that at least two people I was talking two were reliable. But I didn't see any verification of their stories in the media. Then I learned later that doctors who worked for Doctors without Borders had tried to contact The New York Times and one of the Times' reporters had called the State Department and was told there was no truth to the stories. But it was Reagan's State Department, and some of Reagan's people were up to their eyeballs in Iran/Contra and other nonsense in Central America. As we now know, the death squads were quite real.

Joe Klein is upset that his magazine is losing money. Ouch. Most bloggers blog for free or a few dollars a month. I think I get paid about two cents an hour. I have many things I really would rather be doing with my time. Where Joe Klein sees a loss of revenue dollars, I see a growing crisis across a spectrum of issues in my country that I need to write about. Apparently, George W. Bush is not the only one living in a bubble these days.

Bill Moyers Interview

Bill Moyers continues to be a voice that needs to be heard. On Truthout is an interview of Bill Moyers by The Christian Century; Moyers has much to say but here's a brief excerpt:

If the Bush administration were to ask you for your advice, what would you say to them?

(snip)

What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility's sake, but for policy's sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don't sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you're in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi'ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill's definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.

What kind of response did you get from your speech to cadets at West Point, in which you spoke about the limitations and liabilities of war making?

For 30 seconds after I finished there was just silence in that large auditorium, and I thought: "You really blew it this time. You not only lost them, you insulted them." Then one by one, cluster by cluster, row by row, the cadets started standing up and applauding. I had to struggle to contain my emotions. I would like to tell you it was because they agreed with me. The truth is, I think, that they appreciated hearing a civilian talk openly about what they constantly wrestle with privately - the conflict of conscience required in obeying orders from leaders who have taken leave of reality. They listened like no audience I've had in a long time. And afterward they kept me up late in a lively give-and-take.

Earlier in the day I met for over two hours with a score of top cadets who were on their way to compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and the like. They wanted to talk about the environment, science, philosophy, politics, history. The cadets are smart, disciplined and sophisticated people. One just hopes they get the civilian leadership they deserve.

(snip) [Answer to different question:]

Sometimes I think there are too many voices inside my head. Maybe I read too much. But they make sure I never think a matter settled. I'm with Mark Twain on this: "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

What do you think of the success of satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

There can be more truth in a flash of wit than in a full-throated pronouncement by a pundit. I once told Stewart that if Mark Twain were alive today, he would be on Comedy Central. Stewart looked at me as if he wouldn't welcome the competition.

As always, it's difficult to cover Bill Moyers thinking with a a few excerpts. Read the full interview. And click here for a link and thoughts on his West Point speech.

I enjoyed his quote of Mark Twain. I should have a Mark Twain post up in a few days that I've been meaning to do.

There's a striking difference between the words of Bill Moyers and those of George W. Bush. Even when Moyers returns to some of his common themes, he always finds ways to keep the material fresh and to find new ways to makes his ideas accessible. Bush merely turns himself into a parody of a president, parroting the same tired lines over and over without adding insight, facts or reason into his ridiculous statements.

When you hear Bush for fifteen minutes, he encapsulates completely the foolishness of his presidency; there's no need to hear more because every new speech or press conference is the same material over and over—essentially propaganda. It's why we're floundering in Iraq: Bush and his closest advisers don't understand what they're doing and they have no ideas. But, by God, they're determined to put on better photo ops! Karl Rove likes to criticize Hollywood but he has worked hard to turn Bush into a Hollywood product: John Wayne strutting on an aircraft carrier. I grew up liking John Wayne movies and still do but the characters he played were fantasies; there is a place for fantasy in our lives but not in the White House. In the meantime, the nation has been missing a real president for over six years. Somebody like Bill Moyers would have been the real thing. He wouldn't have strutted; he simply would have gotten the job done.

More on Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales

Four years ago, when I first started devoting considerable time to writing about Bush's flawed war plan for Iraq and the various wrongdoing that was coming to light, I was somewhat in despair because too many people writing about these things on the left were so shrill it was highly unlikely that they would get the attention of most Americans who very much needed to know about the nonsense that was becoming increasingly obvious. And the mainstream media was either drinking the Kool Aid like Judy Miller of The New York Times or they were shrugging as if they were watching some vaguely interesting but ultimately unimportant drama (Ted Koppel, as one example, though normally a very fine reporter was infuriating at times: it's a business, it's process, we have to make money, blah, blah, blah). Times have indeed changed. I don't know how much hope there is to change things but at least in 2007, as bad as things are, there is a glimmer of hope. When people begin to recognize we have a problem there is always a glimmer of hope because if you have the facts, there is a chance you can begin to change things for the better.

Indeed, things are bad and there are a growing number of people focusing on the catastrophe that is the Bush presidency. Frank Rich of The New York Times has an article (via Truthout) on some of this and, like me, he's now unavoidably using multiple adjectives and descriptive nouns that still aren't adequate for describing Bush and his presidency (bold emphasis mine):

...the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

In another article on Truthout, Elizabeth de la Vega, "a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years' experience, was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California," explains what's supposed to happen and why the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzalez and his White House handlers has become so dysfunctional and politicized:

Then there's the "Urgent Report" system instituted at DOJ in recent years. Section T3-18.200 of the US Attorney's Manual requires US attorneys' offices to send immediate reports to the highest levels of the Attorney General's Office whenever there are "major developments" - defined to include even procedural motions - in "important cases," which include any cases that present a "high likelihood of coverage in news media, or Congressional interest."

For cases involving public figures, the US Attorney's Manual requires that "appropriate officials, including the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the associate attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the attorney general" be advised of the initiation of any case "in which public figures or entities are subjects of the investigation." Bottom line? The attorney general is notified immediately, not just when charges are brought in a public corruption case, but when the file is opened and every time that any activity, even procedural, occurs in the case. It was precisely such an Urgent Report that former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam used to notify the Attorney General's Office on May 10, 2006 that search warrants were going to be conducted in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham case. The next day, of course, was when Alberto Gonzales's top aide wrote an email talking about the "very real problem we have right now" with Carol Lam.

Think about this for a moment. San Diego County is a generally conservative county, mostly Republican, with several Republican-leaning newspapers, including the San Diego Union Tribune, which broke the story on Duke Cunningham. The last time I looked most Republicans frown on bribery and corruption as much as anyone else, particularly when it is so blatant as it was in the case of Duke Cunningham. When Carol Lam, a Republican by the way, opened an investigation into Duke Cunningham, much of the evidence of corruption was already laid out by the newspapers. Opening the case and beginning the investigation was a no brainer and would be obvious in virtually any district in the nation where there is respect for the law. But Alberto Gonzales's top aide suddenly said they have a problem. If you're a criminal or trying to politicize everything, I suppose that would be one way of looking at it.

White House Correspondents Wimp Out at Dinner

Rich Little was a flop but that wasn't the problem. The association for the White House correspondents picked about as safe a comedian as they could while they concentrate on those seven and eight figure salaries so many of them are shooting for. Here's something to think about. Does anyone think Jonathan Swift would have been easy on our boy king? Does anyone think Mark Twain would give George W. Bush a free pass for trying to resurrect the Gilded Age? Will Rogers would have twirled his lariat and had you thinking the Decider-in-Chief was dizzy with all that rope tightening around him.

These kind of dinners are not supposed to be safe. Not with an incompetent president. Not with a president who thought it was funny to look behind his chair for WMDs. Not with a president who increasingly rambles even when he's speaking to a carefully selected audience. The White House correspondents should be a little restless six years into Bush's presidency with so little for the Mayberry gang to show for it. The president's behavior is a disgrace. The correspondents know it and they continue to act as if it's a kind of parlour game. How's his style? How his haircut? Is he aging? Did he do a good job of putting on a photo op? Was his strutting effective? Does he look like Mister Rogers in that flight suit or like John Wayne? Ah, being a White House correspondent is apparently a difficult life.

Here's a story from Editor & Publisher, people who still care about journalism and the functioning of our democracy:

Rich Little, with shockingly dyed hair, said at the outset that he is “not political” but rather a “nightclub performer who does a lot of dumb, stupid jokes,” then proved that.

He started with a couple of Canada (his native country) jokes and a weak Sen. John McCain, which bombed...

(snip)

Little followed by doing six presidents, including a man he “loved,” Ronald Reagan. He put in false teeth to play Jimmy Carter saying that when he was a peanut farmer “I had the biggest nuts in the county.”

As the presidents got more recent, the impressions got weaker: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then possibly the worst impression of all, the current president. But he closed with the one he is most famous for, Richard Nixon, saying, “Let’s bring him out of the mothballs one more time.”

(snip)

Speaking to E&P afterward, probably aware that his routine went over rather poorly, he said, "this is not the easiest audience in the world." But he said Bush told him when it was over, "absolutely perfect."

Some in the crowd walked out in the middle of the routine-- far more than left during Colbert's performance last year.

Embarrassing. Harry Reid says something to the effect that we're losing in Iraq and the media types, particularly on the right, go nuts. I've said for over three years we're gaining nothing out of this war. We'll end up spending $2 trillion for what? A strut on an aircraft carrier? What are we gaining from Bush's incompetence, lies, cronyism, ideological rigidity, and repeated blunders, all quite visible in his fiasco in Iraq? What are we gaining? Does anybody buy the garbage that if we don't kill Iraqis, they'll come here? Sorry, but the 9-11 attackers came by way of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and most of them were from Saudi Arabia. The logic of attacking Iraq does not hold.

Should it take five years to finish the first war? Should it take ten years to finish the second? Should these idiots be allowed to start a third? It's not about losing. It's about a president and vice president who don't know what they're doing. Other than engaging in fantasies about bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of our guns and fighting terrorism in about as half-assed a way as one could possibly ask for, Cheney and Bush have no policy in Iraq worthy of the name. It's stall, it's dodge, it's tantrums and overblown rhetoric, it's pompous statements about running out of patience or insurgents in their last throes, it's bluster that only the Republican base deludes itself into buying.

Are Bush and Cheney impeachable? Of course they are. Should it happen? Yes. Will it happen? No, not in the current political environment with a media that still does a poor job of revealing the damage the current administration is doing to our country. But enough Americans are aware of what's happening that Bush and Cheney can be held accountable. It's time for a special prosecutor. Forget the incompetence. There's plenty of dishonesty and deception in the current White House for a special prosecutor to deal with. There are plenty of laws being broken. A special prosecutor needs to be appointed by Congress.

If we are to keep our country strong, it's time to bring most of our troops home while keeping troops in strategic position to keep the neighbors out of Iraq. It's time for Bush and Cheney to negotiate a settlement in Iraq and Iran; and if they won't, it may be time for Congress to appoint people who will. There's nothing in the US Constitution that says the American people have to put up with arrogance, gross negligience and obstinate incompetence. Bush, not the Democrats, not Congress, not the American people, is the one who chose to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. The people of the Iraq Study Group, both Republicans and Democrats, have a record of competence. Our president does not. The surge is a profoundly flawed political stunt that puts our troops at risk. It is not a change of strategy: it's just more of the same.

Let me ask it again. Are we losing? Sorry, but that's the wrong question. The question is this: do we have an administration that knows what it's doing? The answer is no. Bush has no trouble talking like a tough guy but he didn't know what he was talking about when he launched the invasion and never had an honest strategic purpose for invading Iraq in the first place, and even if he had managed to come up with an honest strategic purpose, it's highly unlikely he could have executed it with cronies, ideologues and party hacks. We're still a strong and powerful nation. But the current president is a failure. The rest is just hot air and a lot of self-justifications by the right and a lot of nonsense by a media that still can't fully acknowledge the crisis in Washington and particularly the White House.

The White House Correspondent's Dinner

King Lear: Dost thou call me a fool, boy?

Last year, Colbert was brilliant and punctured the external bubble that surrounds President Bush. Bush, however, has layers of bubbles.

The White House correspondents are handling the president with only one kid glove these days instead of two. It's an improvement but not by much. Have the correspondents learned much, or are they more interested in the media slots that offer seven and eight figure salaries these days? The White House press room has often been the path to riches in the media. And a kind of senility regarding the responsibilities of the press ('But I have my family to think about!' (Does this include third and fourth cousins?)).

William Douglas of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has an interesting take on this year's White House Correspondent's dinner:

Impressionist Rich Little hasn't been hot since Nehru Jackets and go-go boots were hip. But the mild-mannered 68-year-old nightclub performer will be the headline act at Saturday's White House Correspondents Association dinner - and the salve for the dagger-sharp tongue of Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, who at last year's dinner satirically slashed President Bush and the Washington press corps beyond recognition.

The selection of Little after Colbert's pointed monologue has produced tons of jokes (What? Nipsey Russell wasn't available?) and amplified screams from the blogosphere that Little's invitation proves how soft the White House press corps is on Bush.

(snip)

The idea behind hiring Little - best known for his impressions of Richard Nixon, Clint Eastwood and other old-school personalities - was to have a nice dinner where Bush could get "singed but not burned" by the evening's entertainment, according to Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents Association.

"You can't invite a guest of honor to come and be a political pinata," said Scully, a political editor at C-SPAN. "There's a very fine line we don't want to cross out of respect for the institution of the presidency."

(snip)

It's hard to be funny, according to comedian-director David Steinberg - and it's even harder in Washington, D.C.

"It's always been a weird audience," said Steinberg, host of TV Land's "Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg." "It takes itself too seriously. They don't realize that the comedian won't hurt them."

TV Land? I don't know if Douglas is writing a serious article or has a very dry sense of humor. I know I laughed a lot reading the article. TV Land? Rich Little? Classics? Dinosaurs? Fossils? Mayberry?

There was an old tradition of court jesters giving succor to their rulers but they were at times given license to mock the king. By all means, parody the nonsense that surrounds a court. Tell the emperor the truth but do it with humor. Puncture that hubris of the Khan but do it gently, but not too gently—those bubbles are made of tough material.

King Lear was an old and foolish king who split his kingdom between two daughters who did not exactly revere him and he banished the only daughter who truly loved him. He issued his decrees based on his fantasy view of his world rather than based on the world as it truly was. As expected, fiasco followed. Here's Shakespeare, Act I:

King Lear: Dost thou call me a fool, boy?

The Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away that thou wast born with.

Earl of Kent: This is not altogether fool, my lord.

Fool: No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part of it: and ladies too, they will not let me have all fool to myself; they'll be snatching. Give me an egg, uncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.

Lear: What two crowns shall they be?

Fool: Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg! When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so.
[The Fool sings]

Fools had ne'er less wit in a year:
For wise men are grown foppish,
They know not how their wits to wear,
Their manners are so apish.

Lear: When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

Fool: I have used them, uncle, ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mother: for when thou gavest them the rod, and put'st down thine own breeches,
[more singing]

Then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-peep,
And go the fools among.

I'll leave to the reader to decide if George W. Bush or his father is the current King Lear. The father is not innocent in the current presidential debacle but, like Lear, he is a more sympathetic character.

But Rich Little, if he chooses, has an obvious target in George W. Bush and even Dick Cheney. Both are playing a game of trying to out-Nixon Nixon and classic mimic Little is still a superb master of glowering while he mutters, "I'm not a crook." I doubt Little will have the nerve to puncture Bush's balloon or to bring down the president's hubris a notch or two. The truth is that the country would relish it and the country needs it. We need to know that the White House correspondents themselves know that there's a limit to how much they should be expected to take our emperor seriously, particularly a failed one.

As things now stand, whether court jesters, or licensed fools, or stand-up comedians show up at the correspondent's dinner, there's a pretentious quality to these correspondents who wish to honor the presidency while we have a president who does little to honor and respect the US Constitution or even the history of his own office.

Kicking the Can Down the Road and Other News

There's not much to say about Bush's dishonest press conference today with the strange Dick Cheney half lurking in the shrubbery looking on (I'm writing this straight but I suppose there's a pun in there somewhere). The media is slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y, coming around to holding Bush more accountable but it's hard work keeping up with the president's less than straightfoward presentation with all its multiple levels of lies, half-truths and hypocrisy; and then there's all that help from his media flacks who can't even keep their multiple stories straight. It's not too difficult to understand what's happening, though. Suffice to say, Bush is a failure—it's all we really need to know from now on. After the November election, Bush had a chance to redeem himself, at least partly, by getting his act together at long last, but he's determined to do more damage than admit his many failures.

When it comes to Iraq no one should doubt that Bush is simply kicking the can down the road for the next president to handle. It's shameful behavior and suggests Bush and his inner circle have learned nothing from Vietnam. Here's an article from Raw Story on an earlier version of kicking the can down the road that didn't quite work:

On Vietnam, Dallek writes that Kissinger and Nixon privately concluded that the war was unwinnable. "In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory," Dallek quotes Nixon in a 1969 phone call to Kissinger. "But you and I know it won't happen -- it is impossible." Yet Kissinger and Nixon sought to label Democrats criticizing the progress of the war as being from "the party of surrender," writes Dallek.

Authoritarians and their followers in the Republican Party still peddle their myths about Vietnam along with their rot that the war was winnable, and yet they conveniently forget the first can kicker was actually Lyndon Johnson who passed Vietnam on to Nixon who had a 'plan' to win the war and who, nevertheless, managed to prolong the war a long and deadly six years. Maha of Mahablog reminds us that press conferences in Johnson's day were much rougher than anything George W. Bush has yet to experience:

I sometimes wish videos of President Lyndon Johnson’s press conferences were available on the web (if they are, let me know). As I remember it, at some point after the Vietnam War began the Washington press corps began to hound LBJ mercilessly. The press became openly antagonistic to Johnson, and I won’t say he didn’t deserve it. When reporters began to treat Richard Nixon the same way they’d treated LBJ, Nixon sent out Spiro Agnew to stir up faux outrage against the nattering nabobs of negativism and whine about liberal media bias; thus a myth was born. The fact is, as I remember it the press was a shade gentler to Nixon than it had been to LBJ. And by the time Reagan came along they’d become sufficiently defensive about “”liberal media bias” that reporters generally treated Reagan with kid gloves compared to the way they’d treated presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. And in comparison to the press corps in Johnson’s day, today’s White House reporters are a neutered and toothless lot, indeed.

War is not a political football. Our soldiers should not be used to prolong a failed foreign policy. There are times when war may be necessary. Afghanistan appears to have been the case in 2001. Bush's war in Iraq, however, was not necessary and was pushed for reasons not in the interests of most Americans for what now can only be described as a shameful political agenda. That's the bottom line. We have some obligation to stabilize Iraq and it's in our interests to withdraw as carefully as we can even if we have to leave troops nearby. But it's time to leave.

It doesn't help when someone like Senator McCain becomes too incompetent to understand Iraq or so flawed in his reasoning and desperation to become the next president that he begins to utter nonsense that doesn't help the debate on Iraq. Steve Clemons of The Washington Note reminds us there are still people in Iraq who know what's going on and they're not very patient with McCain's nonsense; Clemons' post covers a talk by Anne Garrels:

... She is, of course, National Public Radio's veteran roving foreign correspondent most often in Baghdad as of late -- though she seems to have covered nearly all of the world's rough and tough spots over the last couple of decades.

(snip)

...Anne Garrels opened her talk last Thursday night blasting Baghdad visitor and erstwhile presidential candidate Senator John McCain.

Now old news, but then fresh off the wire, John McCain had said that things had improved so much in Baghdad that Iraq Multinational Force Commander General David Petraeus was driving around the city in an unarmord Humvee. Garrels -- who when you read her book strains for balance in her research and reporting -- really lambasted McCain for his duplicitous comments. She said it "was way too early to judge the results from a change in tactics in Baghdad."

She said that McCain's commentary seemed ludicrous to nearly anyone with real world Baghdad experience. Anne Garrels does NOT live in the green zone. She lives in the red zone, beyond the barriers of protection that most Americans have -- and every day is one where one has to be very careful and win the day and survival by his or her wits.

When Garrels covered the invasion of Iraq while staying at the Palestine Hotel, she was there with just 15 other American journalists -- including correspondents for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. ...

(snip)

She told the audience that in Iraq the "resentment and disbelief in the incompetence of America was profound."

She offered much of what any avid Iraq-watcher knows. The White House predicted a cost of this war at $50 billion and didn't really envision an occupation. The costs are now well beyond ten times that amount. The Department of Defense had no serious post-invasion strategy.

But one of the numbers she threw out which shocked me is that today it can cost between $3,500 and $5,000 for a one way taxi ride from the Baghdad Airport to downtown Baghdad. She has arranged some alternative, permanent service that brings the costs down some for NPR.

And McCain says average people like you and me can easily walk around downtown Baghdad...if we can afford it and can find a hundred soldiers to act as our tour guides.

A friend of mine has been complaining lately that I've been getting repetitious and no doubt he's right. Of course, he's one of those people who pays attention. I'm sure other readers may think the same thing. But when I turn on the evening news at night, it's still apparent that many journalists are still not up to speed on the leadership crisis that our country is experiencing. In times of crisis, some things bear repeating.

Very few journalists have been as observant, though, as Paul Krugman of The New York Times; here's a column from the other day as it appears in Truthout:

...voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today's rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren't going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it's harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that "some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind."

But today's Republicans can't respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists won't let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization.

The Republican Party's adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can't offer domestic policies that respond to the public's real needs. So how can it win elections?

The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.

That's the sad truth of George W. Bush and the current Republican Party: at the national level, they can't win on the issues—they can only win by playing games. That's why the US Attorney scandal, only the latest of a series of scandals, is such a big deal: firing honest Republicans who believe in law enforcement and putting in party hacks and cronies that will do the bidding of Republican kingmakers is a big no-no if one still believes in the US Constitution and democracy.

It's going to be a big fight for the next few years, but it's time for the American people to take their country back.

Karl Rove Entertains Press Corps Heavyweights

It's a strange era. I've long been a critic of a media industry that gives away six and seven figure salaries (are we up to eight yet?) to big name people who don't really deserve it. And it's always interesting to see the reactions of the tuxedo set at special functions. Last year, Colbert was brilliant when he roasted the president and yet many media types squirmed and withheld their applause. But Karl Rove? Well, here's the always observant Dan Froomkin of White House Watch:

It seems fitting that even as Karl Rove's politicization of the White House's policy apparatus draws greater scrutiny from Congressional investigators, Rove himself last night was prancing in front of members of the Washington press corps, who appeared to be delighted.

"I'm MC Rove," the political guru yelped as he flailed about in an improvised rap sketch at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner.

It has to be seen to be believed. Here are video excerpts via C-Span and the AP.) Mary Ann Akers blogs for washingtonpost.com with the details.

Rove is indeed the Bush era's master of ceremonies -- and its leading beat-the-rapper. He is also peculiarly able to charm journalists.

Froomkin goes on to say that Karl Rove may be headed for more troubled times, though it would surprise no one if he continues to weather yet another scandal.

But it's the media that troubles me as I write this. Maybe the media no longer thinks much about where we are in these times when they have the salaries they do these days. With a single year of Katie Couric's salary, most of us could retire quite comfortably. But Couric merely represents for many of us the nonserious side of journalism, even if she gets in an honest piece of journalism now and then. She was hired to be perky, not to shine a bright light on places like Washington.

It's the supposedly more serious side of journalism that worries me, from Christopher Matthews manic 'unanalysis' (okay, maybe that's not a word) to George Will's bouts of outright fictions to Tim Russert's overt affection for Republican buffoonery to Joe Klein's egotistical belief that he holds all the answers to everything.

There are good journalists out there but I'm puzzled by the number of good journalists who slowly turn into petrified examples of conventional wisdom or turn into establishment journalists still plying their trade but who barely seem aware of what it is they're saying after a while or what it is that's in front of their noses that they so easily ignore a moment later after an irrelevant distraction like Anna Nicole Smith. And there are big shocks out there sometimes.

Some years ago, one of my bigger shocks was realizing how bizarrely conservative David Brinkley was becoming near the end of his life. This was a guy who had nearly the same legendary status as Walter Cronkite and who covered many political campaigns over the years. In his last years, he hinted on several occassions that what we needed was not democracy but some sort of authoritarian rule. It was weird listening to him.

I can easily understand the cynicism of Washington journalists (and there's the added factor that Brinkley's position seemed to shift over the years) but to turn that cynicism towards something even worse? What was that about? And what was Brinkley's show about? Cokie Roberts. Sam Donaldson. George Will. Was that the new definition of fair and balanced?

The show goes on with George Stephanopoulos but at least over the years George Will was clearly identified as the conservative, but what have Donaldson and Roberts been all along? Conventional wisdom? The continuing voices of Brinkley's cynicism? Like neoconservatives touting the advantages of invading Iraq, I don't take Donaldson or Roberts very seriously except as symptoms of a breakdown in Washington, a breakdown largely driven by the money and power-grabbing of the far right and sometimes supported by weathervane politicians.

One of the ironies of the current era is that a great deal of what we know about Bush Administration scandals and incompetence is because there are still people who know how to do journalism who don't get paid much, and there are people who speak up who care about the law and care about how our government is supposed to function and these people are sometimes Democrats, sometimes independents, and, yes, sometimes Republicans.

Faux News Exposed

Fox News really is the Republican propaganda network. Daily Kos posts the definitive news on the 'fair and balanced' news channel:

... this nugget from Kerry pollster Mark Mellman...

Fox News viewers supported George Bush over John Kerry by 88 percent to 7 percent. ...

We have a president who hears only what he wants to hear. Apparently, a significant number of Republicans have caught the same virus.

Talking Points Memo in the News

It's been weird hearing Talking Points Memo or "TPMMuckraker"mentioned in the news the last few days as the guys who noticed the US Attorney story early on, stuck with it, and largely blew it open. But part of the reason they stuck with it is because they were familiar with some of the US Attorneys from earlier stories, particularly Carol Lam who had pursued the Duke Cunningham case. It's good old fashioned journalism that employs the modern tools of blogs, reader tips and the internet.

Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo are featured in a Los Angeles Times story by Terry McDermott:

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room's perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment.

The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet. Most newsrooms are notably noisy places, full of shrill phones and quacking reporters. Here there is mainly quiet, except for the clacking keyboards.

It's 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration's firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

Read the whole story. You can begin to understand why some powerful Republicans dislike blogs. A good blog like Talking Points Memo can restore journalism's ability to shine a bright shining light on government shennigans (though keep in mind that Josh Marshall and his team are often doing real journalism, such as making phone calls and chasing down information, etc.).

More on That 'Senior Administration Official'

I wrote on Wednesday on Cheney's bizarre habit of playing senior administration official as a way of cloaking his comments. There are times when the media has to rely on anonymous sources to write a story the public needs to hear, particulary in whistleblower situations. And there are times when it's important for an administration to talk off the record (such as testing an idea by allowing an unsourced administration figure to talk openly about something as a way of testing public reaction or possibly the reaction of a foreign government). But too often the Bush Administration has gotten somewhat absurd in its use of unsourced comments.

Ron Hutcheson of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has more on the Cheney nonsense:

The exchange during Cheney's flight to Oman on Wednesday highlighted the absurdity of a practice that's damaged the credibility of journalists and government officials alike. It's much easier to believe what people say when their names are attached to their words. Statements from unidentified people invite readers to doubt that the speakers exist outside of the reporter's imagination. If anonymity is designed to promote candor, it's difficult to find in the anonymous official's quote.

The Bush administration's use of anonymous sources has become a sore spot for reporters in the wake of a series of journalistic scandals involving fabricated quotes. ...

...in Washington, anonymity is too often a cloak for cheap shots and self-serving comments. Some officials insist on anonymity to minimize damage if they misspeak or say something that might be embarrassing. Reporters play along to maintain good relations or out of fear that they might miss something if they refuse to participate.

(snip)

"This has definitely achieved absurdity," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an organization that helps journalists protect their sources. "I don't look at this as anonymous sourcing. I look at this as big-time game playing. The only way to describe it is stupid."

Cheney is one of the most secretive elected officials in our nation's history. In many ways, he's more secretive now than when he was Secretary of Defense. His secrecy obviously invites the question: what is he hiding? Playing senior administration official doesn't help the public and raises any number of questions about the administration's credibility. The more important question, of course, is this: when is the Bush Administration going to start being straight with the American people?

Cheney: The Man Behind the Curtain

Cheney's recent high profile adventures and comments do not appear to be working in his favor. The media is beginning to nail Cheney for some of his nonsense. Remember all the bizarre stories we've heard over the last six years that are by anonymous sources high in the administration? Editor & Publisher has an AP story on one possible source:

So who are those "senior administration officials" you hear quoted in the media?

Sometimes they're VERY senior administration officials.

Take the person who briefed reporters aboard Vice President Cheney's plane after his secret stay in Afghanistan. He didn't want his name used when he talked to reporters, but he kept using the words "I" and "me" as he referred to Cheney and to the reason for the vice president's visit.

It makes it hard to quote Cheney if reporters have to recast quotes in fictional form (I know, I know, there are accepted conventions for this sort of thing, but when anonymous sources are abusing the process to float politically convenient fictions or to out CIA operatives to exact revenge, journalists and editors need to acknowledge they're being used).

Editor & Publisher also has an item on Bob Woodward and his thoughts on journalism:

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said Wednesday that journalists in the U.S. should have been more aggressive in their reporting during the buildup to the Iraq War, according to the Agence France Presse wire service.

Speaking at a conference in Tokyo, the journalist who broke the Watergate scandal reportedly said that the media should have done more to verify claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Woodward means well and certainly has caught up to events to some extent but he goes on to say that reporting on the ground was probably necessary (in Iraq) and that the story might have taken years to properly investigate. Actually, there were red flags stretching all the way from June 2002 to the invasion in March 2003. There were reporters, particularly of the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau (now McClatchy), who were doing stories that seriously challenged administration claims, but many big-name reporters (Woodward included) didn't follow up on those developments. And of course, it would have been useful at the time to know which high level administration figures were doing such heavy-handed spinning and whether indeed there was any reality to their claims. But at this late date, we do know one thing for certain: Cheney's calculated habits of political expediency have done enormous damage to our democracy, our national security and our nation.

Anna Nicole Smith: The Real Mystery

I haven't counted the number of channels we have on TV. Let's say there's about fifty. At least twenty of them at some point during the day are covering stories about Anna Nicole Smith. To be honest, there isn't much on the other thirty channels so I've been reading a lot lately when I'm not working on Donkey Path. My wife, on the other hand, has been determined at times to find something watchable, anything but Anna Nicole Smith, which means I subliminally hear some part of Anna Nicole Smith's name about thirty or forty times almost every evening as the channels fly by. It's like when President Bush gives a major speech: you surf through twenty channels and Bush is still telling us to trust him and how hard his job is and, for the thirteenth time, how victory is just around the corner.

You figure the networks and cable news people have been showing a lot of Anna Nicole Smith because they make money on the story. Or do they? Here's a survey from the Rasmussen Report:

Americans have had enough—more than enough—of news stories about Anna Nicole Smith. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 85% of American adults believe the media has paid too much attention to the story of her death. Just 2% think more coverage is appropriate.

Either a lot of people are lying to the pollsters or the media is working hard to avoid bringing us the news. And thanks to the coverage, poor Anna Nicole Smith is more famous than ever. It's a real mystery that leaving a lot of people scratching their heads.

That's America on February 26, 2007. Have a good night.

Carl Bernstein on George W. Bush

I watched Douglas Feith on Charlie Rose tonight as the former Pentagon official told Charlie one whopper after another. Feith implied that the CIA is responsible for exaggerating the WMD and al Qaida connection with Saddam Hussein as if he had played no part in the Bush Administration's disastrous case for war; in fact, Feith was doing his best at the time to help the Bush inner circle exaggerate things way beyond what the CIA was willing to say.

We're in a strange era since President Bush gives us almost no reason to trust him anymore (I say almost because I believe him when he says he wants more tax cuts that we can't afford to give away) but Republicans are still rubber stamping the president. I think it's always useful to hear journalists who have been around for a long time who aren't dependent on sources in the Bush Administration. The Raw Story has a post on famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein:

Comparing the Nixon administration's press relations to those of Bush, Bernstein says, "Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.

"The Bush administration," Bernstein continues, "is a far different matter in which disinformation, misinformation and unwillingness to tell the truth -- a willingness to lie both in the Oval Office, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the office of the vice president, the vice president himself -- is something that I have never witnessed before on this scale."

The Bush Administration isn't the only part of the fiasco that has been unfolding before our eyes, of course. There was the unwillingness of Congress to hold Bush accountable in the post-9/11 era until just recently. And the media gave Bush a free pass for the longest time, merely laughing when the administration lied or yawning when scandals were revealed (how many times have we heard, "that's an old story"?).

We've seen several movies now where a ship is heading towards a port and there's no way to stop it even though the people on shore watch the ship tear through rows of small boats. The Bush presidency is very much like that—in slow motion. Bush is on the bridge twiddling his fingers, pretending he has nothing to do with the disaster that is clearly of his own making. And there's a smirk on his face because a helicopter is coming to take him off the ship before January 20, 2009. Americans need to understand that without help from the Republicans now, so that Bush can't use his veto to override some very necessary accountability, the next president will find it very difficult to stop that ship before it hits shore.

Why the White House Panicked Over Joe Wilson

It's no surprise that the Libby trial shows the White House in disarray even when it's doing message control, one of the few areas where it supposedly knows what it's doing, at least sometimes. Today, Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly goes back in time to July 2005 and reminds us of a more specific reason why the White House panicked over Joe Wilson statements about the phony Niger/Iraq uranium claim that helped make the case for war in Iraq:

...Step back from Plamegate for a moment and ask yourself a broader question: why did the White House react so violently to Joe Wilson's suggestion that the story about Saddam Hussein trying to procure uranium from Niger was false? After all, as conservative apologists never tire of pointing out, Wilson didn't really debunk George Bush's words in the 2003 State of the Union address. Bush said only that Saddam "sought" uranium from Africa, while Wilson merely provided evidence that no uranium ever changed hands. The fact is, Wilson's report didn't invalidate Bush's statement.

So why did the White House go nuts? What were they so scared of that they went into full-blown smear-and-destroy mode?

One of the advantages of living in Orange County is that I have plenty of centrist and conservative acquaintances, and one thing I've learned from them is that even among Bush's own supporters it was the possibility of Saddam getting hold of nukes that really scared them. Chemical and biological weapons were a bit of a yawn. Without nukes, even Bush sympathizers were skeptical about the whole Iraq adventure.

Kevin Drum doesn't specifically bring it up but his post post is suggestive in terms of validating Libby when he says the White House made him a fall guy in order to protect Karl Rove, the architect of the public relations campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place. In fact, Drum should have pointed out that Rove, in the days after Bush's SOTU speech, was making sure the press got the more detailed version of the Niger/Iraq claim that Wilson indeed debunked. It was never about just sixteen words.

The mainstream media still has much to explain in terms of why it went along with the phony case for war. It was hypocritical, for example, for Tim Russert to give John Edwards the business the other day on Meet the Press over Edwards' admission that he made a mistake on his vote on Iraq in 2002; where was Russert at the time? Russert was pretty much helping the administration make its case for war with far too little close questioning despite available material at the time. It's important to note that one of the things that has come out in the Libby trial is that Russert was considered by the White House as one of their best go-to guys in the press. The mainstream media still has a lot of work to do in terms of cleaning up its act.

Rest in Peace, Molly

As most people know, Molly Ivins died today after three bouts of cancer. There are many tributes to the wonderful writer from Texas and there are many excellent picures of her from recent years but Mahablog caught my eye because she found a picture of Ms. Ivins in her glory days as a redhead. I had almost forgotten that look. It moved me.

James Pinkerton on Hagel and McCain

Bush's war in Iraq is a fiasco. The war was based on lies that the major media bought into line, hook and sinker. Unfortunately, someone has failed to notify James Pinkerton. Here's Pinkerton's first two paragraphs plus a paragraph on Hagel from his article in Newsday (hat tip to The Huffington Post):

It's official: Chuck Hagel is the new John McCain, getting the glowing treatment from glam publications such as GQ. And John McCain is the new Bob Dole - and we know what kind of press Dole got. Perhaps I should explain.

Once upon a time - say, five years ago - the liberal media were infatuated with McCain. Yes, the Republican senator from Arizona was a hard-line conservative on most matters, but he was sufficiently unorthodox on a few issues (campaign finance, global warming, tax cuts) to be newsworthy. In addition, McCain was enough of a George W. Bush basher to keep reporters interested in what he might say next.

(snip)

But of course, just as the media take away, the media also give. And the recipient of media blessings these days is Chuck Hagel, senator from Nebraska. As a Republican critical of the Bush policy in Iraq, Hagel is infinitely more valuable to the anti-war cause than a mere Democrat. After all, nobody is surprised anymore when a Democrat opposes the war, but it's notable when a Republican breaks ranks with his own party's president - especially when he uses such punchy language, referring to the Iraq surge as the "most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

James Pinkerton is far from being the most right wing of commentators so I'm somewhat surprised at his 'interpretation' of the last five years. First, what liberal media? Rupert Murdoch's empire? The Washington Post? The Chicago Tribune? Clear Channel? CNN? The Washington Times? Does Pinkerton mean Tim Russert of NBC who, according to a witness in the Scooter Libby trial, apparently is the favorite go-to person when Cheney wants to get a pro-administration message out? If he means The New York Times, the Times supported Bush on the war for the first two years (and there was also Judith Miller's botched reporting; she was on the witness stand yesterday explaining her methods and relationship to Scooter Libby).

Second, the people in the media 'infatuated' with McCain appear to me to have been somewhat moderate conservatives who saw McCain as one of those rare Republicans willing to admit from time to time, that yes, maybe 2 + 2 = 4; maybe torture is a violation of the Constitution, maybe we need campaign finance reform, maybe the Republican culture of destruction is a bit much, etc. McCain's voting record in Congress of course, with just a handful of exceptions, was just as conservative as the majority of Republican right wingers who now dominate the party. All that changed in 2004 when McCain decided to run for president in 2008; since then, he's been trying the Rove/Bush method of political success.

The Republican Party is broken. The world knows it is broken. A majority of Americans know it is broken. The Republican Party has failed America. It continues to fail America by blocking the will of the American people on things like minimum wage and bringing the war in Iraq to a close before a greater catastrophe unfolds. If there are conservatives, moderates and liberals who look to somebody like Chuck Hagel as the person who might be able to rebuild the Republican Party, it's because we believe it's in the interests of all Americans to have two viable and functioning political parties. Republicans in recent years, with a great deal of help from the media that Pinkerton wishes to label as 'liberal,' has been very successful at winning elections and they have been dismal at governing and addressing the concerns of most Americans.

I know, when Republicans have nothing to say, they look for attack points and labeling the media as 'liberal' when they don't jump through right wing hoops is one of their lazy but somewhat effective methods of getting traction. But Pinkerton on occassion has been one of those conservatives that liberals like myself point to when we wonder if the Republican Party can return to the universe as the rest of us know it. Perhaps I was wrong.

In a Critical Period, Media Must Do Its Job

In retrospect, there's no question the American media didn't do its job in the critical period leading up to Bush's war in Iraq. There were exceptions but the exceptions were drowned out by the drumbeat of war being organized by the White House. There is still an important need for the media to keep checking the facts and claims coming out of the Bush Administration. What we do not need are puff pieces like the one that 60 Minutes did Sunday night on President Bush. CBS should leave puff pieces to that Republican organ, Fox News and instead concentrate on real journalism instead of pictures of the Washington Monument from Bush's helicopter. Bush may be nothing but a big spoiled kid wanting to show off his backyard but that is a significant part of the problem with the Bush presidency. A skeptical eye is needed when examining Bush's new 'policy' of troop surge and the growing noise by his right wing friends who are calling for war in Iran.

The Knight Ridder Washington Bureau was one of the few news organizations before the war in Iraq that interviewed low level administration figures who were uneasy about what Bush and Cheney were claiming back in 2002; it's now the McClatchy Washington Bureau and here's a story by Mark Seibel (h/t to Talking Points Memo):

President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq.

(snip)

The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself. The Iraq Study Group, in its December report, concluded, for example, that the U.S. military was systematically under-reporting the violence in Iraq in an effort to disguise policy failings. The group recommended that the military change its reporting system.

Whether many of the administration's statements about Iraq for nearly five years have been deliberately misleading or honest but gullible mistakes hasn't been determined. The Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete an investigation into the issue that was begun but stalled when Republicans controlled the committee.

On Thursday, frustration over the accuracy of administration statements on Iraq boiled over during Rice's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

"Madam Secretary," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., "I have supported you and the administration on the war, and I cannot continue to support the administration's position. I have not been told the truth over and over again by administration witnesses, and the American people have not been told the truth."

CBS and 60 Minutes should read the article before Bush gets us into a wider war.