A little perspective on Democrats and Brown, plus something really imporant
I realize that Politico’s meme of the day, based on 2/3 of the articles on the front page this morning is that based on the Massachusetts election, in which a majority of voters elected someone who still hasn’t call himself a Republican, and despite the fact the Republicans continue to poll considerably lower than both Democrats and the president, Democrats all across the country should just put all their stuff on Ebay and jump off the nearest tall building. And yes, being Democrats, many of them (especially the elected ones) are probably photographing and tagging their worldly posessions at this very moment And the media has already begun what is sure to be a full week of feverish, adoring, breathless over-coverage of Scott Brown, who in a single master stroke cemented the Republican Party’s 41-59 majority in the Senate, and who every Republican in America wants to BE (except the pro choice part) … hey, didn’t every Republican wanted to be Bob McDonnell like, a few days ago???
But while the White House and D.C. Democrats clearly messed up last year, let’s keep a little perspective, people. The president still polls considerably higher than any other politician, and higher than both his own and the opposition political party. Americans still trust this president much more than they trust anyone around him in Washington. Despite his mistakes, Obama can rebound. He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and darn it, people like him. Even Politico was forced to admit that. Meanwhile, an AP poll conducted last week finds that while Obama’s right track/wrong track number is still on the wrong side of 50, at 44/50 percent, it’s only 4 points lower than it was at its highest point in 14 moths (48/46 percent in April) and a damn sight higher than Bush’s exit rt/wt number of 17 /78 percent in October 2008. Obama’s approval rating in the AP poll is 56 percent, down a lot from the 73 percent he enjoyed before the inauguration, but not half bad, compared to other first term presidencies including Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s. So let’s get a grip, people. Democrats still control the House and Senate (and if you go by Michael Steele, they still will after November, though with smaller majorities … btw on that he and I agree.) More perspective from Slate.
Besides, the big news today isn’t how fascinating Scott Brown is. It’s this: Read more
Chasing Sarah Palin chasing the news
*It is no longer possible to hide the decline of a once great newspaper, no longer possible to hide the decline of the paper that broke the Watergate story, but is now hanging itself on the Climategate story,” writes James Romm of the Center for American Progress in Politico’s Arena, regarding the Washington Post’s decision to publish an extended version of Sarah Palin’s Facebook notes as an op-ed, in which she (and/or her ghostwriter) calls on President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks, and expounds on her view that climate change is an exagerated phenomenon. (Of course, she doesn’t use them kinda big, long-head words, for she is Sarah Palin.) The Post is being roundly panned for the decision to allow the obsessed D.C. press corps’ version of Perez Hilton to appear on its vaunted pages, where once Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, and for appearing to pretend that there is still a serious debate over whether climate change is in fact real.
Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic chimes in, saying, “Once again, the Washington Post has given Sarah Palin the chance to harness herself to the political story of the hour.” And that, in the end, is what Palin is about. Whatever’s in the news, she Facebooks about it, and the credulous media comes a-runnin’. After all, what could be more illuminating than the views of someone who knows absolutely nothing about science, and who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old, on climate change? (Ambinder helpfully annotates the ex-half-term governor’s silly missive, for the non-Palinites out there, who after all, are the ones who know what “annotates” means…) Read more
Axelrod states the obvious: Fox is not ‘news’
Why is this still surprising to anyone? We all know what Fox is, and accept it. What would have really been newsworthy would have been Axelrod taking a firm position on whether the president will or won’t sign a healthcare bill without a public option. Now THAT would have been shocking. Anyway, if you care to watch Axelrod take his only firm position of the interview, here it is:
And the up-shot, which may be more relevant, which is that the White House is using attacks on Fox News to influence not the Murdoch organization, but the actual news organizations they want to steer away from following Fox’s lead when it comes to story selection: Read more
Howard Dean leads the way, gives Dobbs the old ‘heave ho’
Here’s a thought: those in the rational end of the gene pool here in the United States, and who are sick of the increasingly crazed, dangerous, homicidal tone of the right wing fringe (which increasingly includes supposedly mainstream cable television hosts, and which is sucking in disappointed Palin-McCain voters like a giant vacuum cleaner…) there is something that can be done. Normal people should simply freeze them out. Stop appearing on their radio and television shows. Stop taking their bookers’ calls. Leave them to their “base” [Sidebar: the similarities between the right, with its military style training camps, gun hoarding, violent hate speech online and from media-savvy mullahs who preach a religious- and race-based form of hatred (now targeting the president of the United States) and movements like al-Qaida ... which coincidentally, translates to "the base..." are striking, aren't they?] Isolate them the way you would do a virus, or contagion (that’s just for you, “Euthanasia” Beck.) In fact, Howard Dean may be showing us the way:
Days after calling Howard Dean as a “bloodsucking leftist” who could only be stopped with “a stake through his heart,” CNN host Lou Dobbs reached out to the former Democratic National Committee Chairman to invite him on his radio show.
Dean declined the offer, according to a source close to the one-time presidential candidate.
The attempt by Dobbs to “clear the air” extended to Dean’s brother, Jim Dean, who chairs the group Democracy for America (DFA). But he too declined the chance to go on Wednesday’s program. The outreach was too little, too late.
What DFA is pushing for is Dobbs’ ouster, not some airtime. And good for them. Even short of that, Dobbs has proved himself to be an unserious player in the real world — CNN’s Glenn Beck. So let Lou book Beck or one of the other right wing loonies on his show — and only them. Going on these programs, or on Fox News, simply legitimizes them, and threatens to embarrass those who take the bait (like those poor panelists on Beck’s “tree of death” show earlier this week. Better to leave them to their own devices.
Of course, ignoring them might only make their nutjob followers even angrier, but the CNBC searching for angry teabaggers email leak makes it clear that the public ragefest that’s emboldening the truly fringe elements out there, who now must feel like they’ve finally pulled together a large enough group to mount some sort of “revolution” against the president (which is only true in their creepy internal monologue…) is being fueled at least in part by the media’s interest (as Jon Stewart hilariously points out.) As long as people like Dobbs can still attract newsworthy or otherwise credible guests, they will continue to be the shiny keys the dog whistle televised press can’t resist.
The political-media complex’s tortured logic
Glenn Greenwald concludes, quite rightly, that the political-media class is too corrupt to really take on torture, at least not above the level of “rogue interrogators” (which I guess means guys who don’t have cushy jobs at Berkely or the power to order the CIA to violate the law…) while Digby relieves me of the duty of watching another tedious “This Week” roundtable on TiVo.
Washington Bitchy: Nico Pitney smacks down Milbank
Mr. Washington Sketchy himself, WaPo king of snark Dana Milbank, takes one to the thorax from HuffPo blog reporter Nico Pitney, who went one-on-three on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Milbank got called out for his whingeing over Pitney’s Iran question at Barack Obama’s recent presser, including getting called out on his past, gushing coverage of George W. Bush. Watch, and learn:
Afterwards Pitney says Milbank called him names under his breath. Pouty journalism at its best — hating on new media because they can’t BE new media.
The LA Times reluctantly gives TMZ its props (sort of)
The media hates to love TMZ, the site that broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death (even as the MSM refused to pick up the story until the LATimes confirmed it) but they have little choice but to pay attention.
John Landay’s Cheney smackdown. Look for the media to ignore it.
McClatchy News’ national security reporter Jonathan Landay breaks down the Dick Cheney torture jeremiad, and finds it wanting…
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were “legal” and produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”
He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”
In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”
A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
There’s much more, but don’t expect the rest of the media to rally to Landay’s factual cause. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out earlier this week, the mainstream media has long since moved the center to the right, and adopted the Cheney version of reality when it comes to war and national security, and relegated all other versions to the fringe:
What is, in my view, most noteworthy about all of this is how it gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country’s institutions — particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media — acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.
Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what Goldsmith calls the “essential elements” of “the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy.” That’s because — contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush — the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism was right; those policies are “centrist”; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the Far Left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.
Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press’ Liz Sidoti:
Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
When it comes to torture and Bush’s Terrorism policies, it’s the Far Left (which opposes those things) versus “the rest of the country” (which favors them). And she described Obama’s embrace of Bush’s policies as “governing from the center.” Apparently, Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?
BTW, if you caught MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, you see Greenwald’s point. The show, which increasingly is obsessed with rehabilitating the George W. Bush presidency, with Joe and Mika pulling the wagons and only Donny Deutsch and Lawrence O’Donnell running interference for the reality based community, has now become the new, unofficial home of that nasty piece of right wing work: Liz Cheney. Today, they gave her a full hour to bond with Mika and kvetch about Barack Obama not appreciating her dad.
ReidBlog: The "Counterspin" interview
Here’s the interview I did this week with FAIR’s radio show, “Counterspin.”
Shameless self-promotion: Joy on "Counterspin"
Just completed the interview with Fairness and Accuracy in Media’s “Counterspin,” regarding my CommonDreams article on the media’s ho-hum attitude toward the Bush administration’s “torture for war” program. You can catch the podcast of the show, hosted by Steve Rendall and Janine Jackson here.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to the interview.
Previous:
Connect
Book deals
Links
Finalist: Best Liberal Blog
Poll
Loading ...
