America's Next Great Dissembler

Bobby Jindal has an interesting op-ed today in the Washington Post - I guess he won that "America's Next Great Pundit" contest - claiming that nobody wants the Democratic plans for health care reform.

But memo to Washington: The debate on health care has moved on. Democratic plans for a government takeover are passé. The people don't want it. Believe the polls, the town halls, the voters. Only Democrats in Washington would propose new taxes on businesses and families in the middle of a recession, $900 billion in new spending at a time of record deficits, and increased taxes on health insurance and products to reduce health-care costs.

You'll notice that Jindal offers no numbers as proof that "the people don't want it," no actual polls to back up his claim. Chris Good has those numbers, and Jindal is wrong. In fact, more recent polls show that reform has grown stronger in September after bottoming out in August. The fact that Jindal doesn't give any proof for his assertion is what you would call a "tell".

Jindal then goes on to outline some Republican ideas for health care, but of course none of these are in any Republican bills for health care reform, because there is no such document. These are the Bobby Jindal ideas for health care, and half of them are already embedded in the Democratic effort - guaranteed issue for pre-existing conditions, aiding small businesses to buy insurance, portability through the exchanges, transparency in billing, delivery system reform, health IT, covering children up to age 25, rewarding healthy lifestyles and prevention.

The Washington Post has written enough about the health care debate to know that support is strengthening for reform, and that lots of Jindal's ideas have been adopted in the overall legislation. But their op-ed page allows anyone to print whatever lies they decide to forward that day, so they say nothing about the facts of Jindal's piece. They are intentionally misleading their readers, and they don't seem to care.

You've Never Talked Nicely About The Moon, Why Do You Hate Nature

Joke Line went way over the edge yesterday, using language that would make Joe McCarthy proud to savage Glenn Greenwald, with additional slurs thrown in for good measure.

Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet. That such a thing would happen is unfortunate, and dishonorable, but sadly inevitable, I suppose. I ignored the first case, in which a rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald's published a hyperbolic account of a conversation I had with her at a beach picnic on Cape Cod.

Stop it right there. That "pathetic woman acolyte" is aimai, I.F. Stone's grand-daughter, who had a conversation with Klein recently and wrote about it. Classy of Joke Line, who got famous by writing up other people's private conversations under an anonymous byline, to call the progeny of an actual journalist lineage a "pathetic acolyte". You know that author you like to read? Why are you such an acolyte? Pathetic! Aimai takes care of that one easily.

Joke then moves on to Greenwald. This is how he proves that the Salon writer "cares not a whit for America's national security."

For the past several years, Greenwald has conducted a persistent, malicious campaign to distort who I am and where I stand. He is a mean-spirited, graceless bully. During that time, I have never seen him write a positive sentence about the US military, which has transformed itself dramatically for the better since Rumsfeld's departure (indeed, he ridiculed me when I reported that the situation in Anbar Province was turning around in 2007). I have never seen him acknowledge that the work of the clandestine service—performed disgracefully by the CIA during the early Bush years—is an absolute necessity in a world where terrorists have the capability to attack us at any time, in almost any place. Nor have I seen [him] acknowledge that such a threat exists, nor make a single positive suggestion about how to confront that threat in ways that might conform to his views. Therefore, I have seen no evidence that he cares one whit about the national security of the United States. It is not hyperbole, it is a fact.

There's a backstory to this. Greenwald made Joke Line into a fool during the FISA debate, when he admitted that he had no idea what he was talking about but still bothered to pontificate about FISA as if an expert, claiming that Democrats wanted to give terrorists "the same rights as Americans". Joke was exposed as an idiot and a knave, and he's mad. He's carried this grudge for two years because Greenwald de-pantsed him in front of the whole Village.

So, he has decided to make the "I've never seen Glenn Greenwald thank his mailman - how dare he claim to support the postal service and other government programs!" argument. Putting aside the irrelevant fact that Greenwald has written favorably of the military, this is really about as low as a so-called "liberal" columnist can get, demanding the journalistic version of a national loyalty oath before being let into the club. This idea that Americans cannot criticize certain hallowed elements of our national security apparatus without first gravely intoning the deep respect and admiration we all have for them is about the silliest and also the most dangerous sentiment I've seen expressed in a long time. Joke Line has been called "the liberal media" for so long he longer has to think about reflxively slobbering all over the institutions of authority, like a Pavlovian dog he does it by nature. And thus it becomes natural to slam opponents in the terms of whether or not they sufficiently meet the same standard of creepy hero worship. Jim Henley takes this where it appears to be going.

You may think that we already live in a country where everything is “Veterans Memorial” This or “American Legion” that, but we have not begun to express adequate appreciation for our armed forces, clandestine services and military contractors. I think we should start by renaming Joe Klein as Armed Forces Triple Canopy Memorial Oh Dark Thirty Klein. Glenn Greenwald will be Flag Day COIN Enhanced Interrogation Greenwald. It is a little-known fact that IOZ’s real name is Ronald Forward Operating Base Reagan Military Roethlisberger, so that’s one. This blog’s name shall immediately and henceforth be “Pentagon Yay!”

To Klein this is simply an expression of rage against someone who got the better of him two years ago. He fell in the punchbowl and now he wants to beat up the guy who laughed the loudest. Moreover, Klein wants to shut the velvet rope of the private DC club he and his pals have enjoyed for so long, so he figures he'll marginalize Glenn Greenwald by painting him as an America-hating extremist (the true colors really come out in times like these) so he can nibble on cocktail weenies in peace.

Greenwald's response is restrained, given the circumstances.

Where Ya Been?

Steven Pearlstein is shocked, shocked to see dishonesty at the RNC:

After reading his broadside, one is left wondering exactly what health reform plan Steele thought he was attacking. At one point, Steele claims that Democrats would prevent Americans from keeping their doctors or an insurance plan they like. Later, he warns that government will soon be setting caps on how many heart surgeries could be performed in the United States each year. Where is he getting this stuff? Has the chairman of the Republican Party somehow gotten hold of a top-secret plan for a government takeover of the health-care system that GOP operatives snatched during a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters?

If all that sounds like a spurious and unsubstantiated allegation, it is. And it fits right in with the cynical lies, distortions and political scare tactics that Steele and other Republicans have used to poison the national debate over health reform.

Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame?

The answer is no, and a lot of us had this one figured out long, long ago. Here's Joe Klein discovering the same thing about conservative front groups and professional liars. James Fallows has been on this beat for a while, but even he succumbs to asking "will it never end?"

And now we have the New York Times, in a big take-out story, saying that Dr. Emanuel, in his role as Obama health-care advisor, is in an "uncomfortable place" because he is being criticized by*:

1) Betsy McCaughey !
2) Rep. Michele Bachman (look her up) !!
3) Sarah Palin !!!
4) Lyndon LaRouche !!!!

McCaughey, Bachman, Palin, LaRouche -- shaping American debate and media coverage about health policy? Was Zsa Zsa Gabor not available?

I think Fallows knows the answer: no. Being complete liars and obstructionists has worked out pretty well for the GOP. They get to maintain power even when they don't hold the Congress or the Presidency. They all make a lot of money off the lies in which they traffic. They go to beds with the clear consciences of people choosing not to see the suffering caused by their handiwork. And they get no penalty whatsoever from the media.

I suppose it's good that people like Pearlstein and Klein are waking up to this. But it won't take them long to balance themselves by saying, well, what Klein said in his recent piece, that liberals are scumbags too, sure, don't get him wrong. This amazing story of Klein confronted by aimai, the grand-daughter of I.F. Stone, and then sputtering about the god-damned liberals for the next hour, is very revealing. It doesn't matter how many instances of Republican perfidy confront them, establishment types and their reflexive hatred of hippies will always allow that reflexivity to color their thoughts.

Paul Krugman nails this.

It’s all true. But I’m having a hard time writing columns like that. Why? Because while the raw dishonesty of the modern GOP appears to be a revelation to Pearlstein, Joe Klein, and others, I thought it was obvious at least as far back as the 2000 election campaign. (If I’d really been paying attention, it would have been obvious much earlier.)

Don’t get me wrong: I welcome Pearlstein and Klein to the reality-based community — better 9 years late than never. And in a way they have an advantage: having fought this thing for so long, I just can’t muster the same sense of shock. But I think it is important to realize that the current behavior over health care is nothing new — in fact, it’s been this way for a very long time.

As Rick Perlstein, our premier historian of the rise of modern movement conservatism, puts it, crazy is a pre-existing condition.

It's just the way things are.

Spitting Out The Mouthpiece

Where oh where will I get my weekly dose of horrendously bad comedy now?

The Washington Post has brought down the curtain on "Mouthpiece Theater."

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli killed the satirical video series Wednesday after harsh criticism of a joke about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had prompted him to pull the latest episode from the paper's Web site Friday night. The Post staffers who appeared in the videos, Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, agreed with the decision and apologized in separate interviews.

"I don't think the series worked as they intended," Brauchli said. "It was meant to be funny and insightful and translate the superb journalism Chris and Dana do in print and online into a new format."

"Mouthpiece Theater" was designed as a sendup of pompous punditry, with Milbank, the paper's Washington Sketch columnist, and Cillizza, a White House correspondent who writes The Fix blog, appearing with oversized pipes and smoking jackets.

Um, it wasn't a sendup of anything. It was exactly what it looked like - bitchy, self-regarding gossip from two inside-the-Beltway Villagers who accurately translated their feelings of entitlement into video form. They weren't sending up pompous punditry, they were EXHIBITING it.

By the way, you'll be excited to know that Brauchli praised Milbank and Cillizza effusively and welcomed them back to work on their regular assignments of spouting conventional wisdom and producing Mean Girl low-rent Maureen Dowd ripoffs (which is quite a feat).

Department Of National Pundits Who Know Nothing About California, Aug. 3 Edition

We've already seen a trend of national columnists using California's budget woes to conveniently push whatever obsession they want. Two more of these land on the nation's most august op-ed pages today, both of them inaccurate and out of touch with the nature of the situation here in the Golden State.

First we have fiscal scold Robert Samuelson trying to use California's budget crisis to make a larger point about a national "fiscal reckoning." He claims that California has "made more promises than its economy can easily support," as has the nation, and only fiscal austerity can remedy the problem.

On paper, the state could solve its budget problems by raising taxes further. But in practice, that might backfire by weakening the economy and tax base. California scores poorly in state ratings of business climate. In a CNBC survey, it ranked 32nd overall but last in "cost of business" and 49th in "business friendliness." Information technology (Intel, Google, Hewlett Packard) and biotechnology remain strengths, but some traditional industries are struggling. High costs, as well as tax breaks from other states, have caused movie studios to shift production from Southern California. In 1996, feature films involved 14,500 production days in the Los Angeles area, says FilmL.A.; in 2008, the figure was half that.

So California is stretched between a precarious economy and a strong popular desire for government. The state's wrenching experience suggests that, as a nation, we should begin to pare back government's future commitments to avoid a similar fate. But California's experience also suggests we'll remain in denial, prisoners of wishful thinking, until the fateful reckoning arrives in the unimagined future.

Ezra Klein does a pretty good job with this column, noting it provides a lesson for the difference between fiscal responsibility and fiscal conservatism. Samuelson, of course, is the latter, wanting a low-tax, low-spending country. Rather than arguing for a balanced solution, Samuelson eschews taxes due to the "business climate," even though many businesses cite the lack of investment in education and infrastructure that Samuelson is CALLING for as a reason for their concern about their future in the state. In addition, the "businesses are leaving California" argument is a myth applied to all states by fiscal scolds as a means for them to race to the bottom and provide as many corporate tax breaks as possible. Which California has done, to the tune of $2 billion a year, at a time when funding for state parks and domestic violence shelters and poison control units gets slashed. Ezra adds:

Samuelson implies otherwise, but California isn't a particularly high-taxing state. Total state and local taxes take up 11.73 percent of the average Californian's income. The national average is 11.23 percent. And it's been like that for many years [...]

Nor is California's spending on education somehow out of the ordinary. The state ranks 29th in the country on education spending (much lower per pupil; try 47th -ed.). And recent tax cuts haven't been helping the Golden State out. This graph from the California Budget Project shows the contribution that decades of tax cuts have made to the state's current fiscal crisis. It's a pretty depressing story [...] The budget deal that Arnold Schwarzenegger just accepted contained $15 billion in spending reductions. Absent the tax cuts of the last few decades, most of those reductions wouldn't be needed (add the vehicle license fee increase and you're talking about a surplus -ed.).

Samuelson is essentially making an argument about the kind of government he likes, using the California situation to illustrate it, the facts be damned.

Next up is Ross Douthat, who uses the California mess and contrasts it with Texas to create some notion of red states faring better in the recession, also at odds with the facts:

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area.

Douthat also throws in the "rich businesses and rich people are fleeing California" canard, which as stated above is untrue about businesses and even less true about rich individuals.

Steve Benen deconstructs the argument about Texas being a great economic steward and California a basket case, and the reasons why. As Benen says, Texas is the worst state in America for the uninsured and the second-worst state for poverty rates. To conservatives who judge the progress of a state by the budgetary balance sheet and not the prosperity of the citizenry, I'm sure they are a model citizen.

Meanwhile, calling California a "liberal laboratory" and not recognizing the source of the crisis, namely the conservative veto on the budget process, speaks to Douthat's complete ignorance about the nature of the state. In addition, as Paul Krugman notes, there is no correlation between a state's perceived ideology and their economic performance (two of the highest-unemployed states are South Carolina and Tennessee), nor is there any correlation between the level of taxation and the current unemployment rate.

I know that the dysfunction of what is seen on the national level as a blue state is an inviting target for conservative columnists to spin some wider tale about liberal failure and conservative ascendancy. If only they had any knowledge of the actual facts involved.

Hey Paul Krugman, Where The Hell Are You Man

Paul Krugman just completely nails the Dan Froomkin firing. What's more, he does this as someone IN THE EXACT SAME POSITION as Froomkin - a mainstream liberal newspaper columnist, probably hated by his peers as much as Froomkin was allegedly hated by his. There's of course a difference between the editorial board of NYT and WaPo, but that's just a dangerous move by Krugman. And yet.

Not excerpting, you have to go read it.

...Conservatives are so persecuted on editorial pages like the Washington Post's, aren't they?

...By the way, on the day that Dan Froomkin gets fired, the WaPo published an op-ed from... Paul Wolfowitz. Man, talk about failing upwards...

Froomkin Torched

I actually don't read a ton of punditry, which may sound odd to some people. I prefer primary sources, and I find the High Broderism so prevalent in the chattering class to be completely unworthy of the slog. If a pundit says something particularly egregious I'll probably find it from elsewhere. But to me, Dan Froomkin was quite a good pundit, always intellectually honest and worth reading. And so the Washington Post fired him today, according to Michael Calderon. Several things are notable about this. Glennzilla notes that Froomkin's columns are widely read and populat online. Second, far from being a house organ for the President as long as he had a D next to his name, of late Froomkin has shown himself completely willing to criticize the President from the left:

The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

The Post, a sea of arch-conservatives (Will, Krauthammer) and status-quo Broderists (Hiatt, Cohen, Broder) had an oasis with Froomkin, who did the work media should do - questioning power vigorously regardless of ideology. Now they fired him. Sad.

...Froomkin's statement:

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t "working" anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else.

President Nelson Makes The Call

So the President from Nebraska has weighed the options, peeked at his campaign account, and decided with a heavy heart that he just couldn't let Americans have better health insurance choices:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Friday that he will oppose legislation that would give people the option of a public health insurance plan. The move puts him on the opposite side of two-thirds of Americans.

A poll released this week by Consumer Reports National Research Center showed that 66 percent of Americans back the creation of a public health plan that would compete with private plans. Nelson, in comments made to CQ, joins the 16 percent of poll respondents who said they oppose the plan.

Nelson's problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. "At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game," Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a "deal breaker."

The problem, as President Nelson explained, is that the public plan might be too good a deal for Americans, leading them to want to purchase it. And that would just be terrible. Terrible for Ben Nelson, anyway, because his contributions would dry up.

The company Nelson finds himself in is laid out clearly: business, the insurance industry, and Republicans. Of course, this isn't surprising, considering his campaign donation history. Open Secrets says Nelson received $608,709 from the insurance industry in 2007-2008, making the insurance industry his biggest donor group, more than lawyers and even lobbyists.

And so, Nelson has decided to bow to the wishes of his campaign contributors, instead of standing up for what 73% of the American public want: A choice of a public health insurance option.

Actually, I think we do put too much emphasis on the money game as the reason for politician's every move. Nelson probably just has a personal, cultural, ideological relationship to conservative interests, and simply cannot envision progress of this ilk. Plus, publicly opposing his own party makes him a darling of the DC media circuit and increases his clout. Despite the fact that reconciliation instructions mean that Democrats could opt for passage with only 50 votes, Nelson will get lots of publicity as he, according to the article, tries "to assemble a coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it." And the chattering class will praise his bold centrism and ability to say no to his hippie cadres.

He may not be successful - in this case, Democrats on the left really are threatening no deal without a public plan, although what form that plan takes is more the question - but it'll sure give him that unbeatable stature. That's what makes a President a President.

See No Pulitzer, Hear No Pulitzer, Speak No Pulitzer

Yesterday, New York Times reporter David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative story about the Pentagon pundits who embed inside network and cable news as "military analysts," and all the conflicts of interest therein. Incredibly, the victory came despite practically no mentions on television news whatsoever.

By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon's secret collaboration with these "independent analysts" shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called "independent analysts" the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow's story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.

Indeed, NBC and CNN's reporting on the Pulitzer winners carefully avoided any mention of Barstow's story. NBC even ran a separate piece last night using one of the "military analysts" of the type in the Pentagon pundits investigation. As Glennzilla asks, "Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television -- let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times?"

Did I expect any different? No. But the parallel structure of the news these days - where the conservation in one corner bears absolutely no resemblance to the conversation in the other - is quite striking.

Could Have Been A Lot Worse

Ross Douthat is not somebody I agree with all the time, but I've read him enough to know that he's at least slightly more intellectually honest than a Bill Kristol. What's more, his getting the number two editorial job at the New York Times signals that at least they're willing to take a chance on a 29 year-old instead of some retread from the conservative movement. Knowing that this was going to be a conservative choice, it could have been way more awful.

A bit of a secret - I don't make an appointment to read a lot of op-eds. Unless I really trust the source or I need more of an understanding of a particular topic, I feel like I can make the assessments entirely on my own. I guess I tired of the stupid somewhere along the line. I stopped watching the Sunday chat shows for the most part, too. It's very refreshing.

...just because it could have been a lot worse doesn't mean that Douthat isn't a maniac. It's a low bar, after all.

Replay This Quote Over And Over Again

Peggy Noonan, paid pundit, four years ago:

The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

Yes, let us.

She will have another book deal next year.

The Myth Of A Maverick

Matt Stoller has scored an incredible interview with a staffer from John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign. It might not surprise you, given the sludge that his campaign is currently running, that the style is virtually unchanged from those days, when he was this supposed straight-talking honorable maverick. John McCain hasn't changed a bit.

McCain 2000 staffer: Yes, in South Carolina he had the Quinn's running his campaign out of their office. McCain did very well with establishment Republicans in NH... they helped him get his big win there along with independents. The Quinn's (Rick and Richard) are notorious.

Matt Stoller: For what?

McCain 2000 staffer: Well, they are probably one of the few consultants in SC that everyone would want. But... They also publish the Southern Partisan magazine. Which is extremely racist.

McCain 2000 staffer: McCain had their support and they were our consultants there. A good get for a Republican in the primary.

Matt Stoller: Wow

McCain 2000 staffer: He also had the support of some state officials and legislators that were important. Not to mention Graham and Sanford who at the time were both US Reps. Now one is a Senator and the other is Governor

Matt Stoller: The general consensus among pundits is that McCain in 2000 was destroyed by George Bush's dirty tricks (masterminded by Karl Rove). These tricks included claims he fathered a black child and attacks on his record in Vietnam.

McCain 2000 staffer: Had the Quinn's won SC for McCain he would have been the nominee in 2000.

Matt Stoller: But that McCain himself ran an honorable campaign.

McCain 2000 staffer: Ha! Again, the story is more detailed than that. Rove ran a Rove campaign. So yes, they were dirty. But we were too. I remember the week after NH, we surged in SC polls from something like 10pts behind Bush to 10pts ahead. After a little slipping because Bush was letting surrogates go after McCain's military history, we went up with an ad that said Bush twisted the truth just like Clinton. The ad aired for one day. The press said McCain was going negative, the Bush people screamed bloody murder, and our campaign went into a tail spin. Had that ad not run, I'm convinced, and if you spoke to people from the SC campaign or Weaver or Davis and they were honest with you they would agree, that ad sank the campaign.

Matt Stoller: What were some of the rumors the campaign was pushing about Bush?

McCain 2000 staffer: I remember talking with reporters after events about Bush's DUI. I remember senior press staff doing that. I remember them talking about Laura Bush's horrible car accident, saying that she may have been drunk when it happened. On a funny side note, during a debate Bush held up this flyer we were handing out door to door and at events that said Bush would hurt seniors... it was a really nasty flyer aimed at scaring the elderly. So Bush holds it up and asks McCain about it. McCain looks at Bush and says it isn't from his campaign. Bush points out that it says McCain's campaign paid for it. McCain then says well we have stopped doing that. Keep in mind, McCain swore off negative TV ads after the Clinton one failed so badly. So I'm watching the debate and I'm like... is he crazy? We have people in the field handing that out TONIGHT. He blew up at the staff that night over the flyer. Vintage McCain. He doesn't mind getting deep in the mud when it works for him. But if he gets caught? Hell-to-pay. And then he plays the straight-talking martyr.

Matt Stoller: Was he responsible for the flyer, or was it some sort of rogue operation within the campaign? What kind of tone did he and his senior advisors set?

McCain 2000 staffer: Ultimately McCain signed off on everything. That's how he operated. Very military minded, chain of command so to speak. The tone? Well, I think a story illustrates that better. On the campaign we had this right of passage called being WOW'd. It stood for Wrath of Weaver. If you ever experienced his wrath you essentially made it to the in-team. McCain on the other hand, being on the receiving end of his temper was NEVER a good thing. It wasn't something you bragged about over drinks with co-workers like you did with Weaver. It could be brutal. It's sort of funny in retrospect. At the end of ads these days, candidates have to say 'I'm so and so, and I approve this message." McCain is the guy who made that law. To see the filth he's been approving is pretty sick, but not unexpected.

This would be a nice story to fax to David Broder and Chris Matthews and Joe Klein, these pundits who did somersaults any time McCain was in their general orbit for years, and who think that this dive into the muck is only of recent vintage. McCain has been saying and doing anything to get elected for a long, long time. The gasbags became so impressed by this military man and his presumed honor that they made up a story about him, created an image basically out of nothing, an image that until this year made him the most respected Republican politician in America. Now a few of them are seeing the error of their ways, but they're replacing it with another story - John McCain's changed. He had to go to the dark side in this election. He didn't even want to, it's those Rove protégés around him that are pushing this noble warrior into it.

Wrong. All wrong. McCain lives for knifing his political enemies. He just wants deniability for it, which so many in the media are willing to give him thanks to this carefully cultivated image. The great axiom of modern politics is that if someone on television is telling you how honorable a politician is, well, just turn the sound off, because it's nothing but inauthentic flattery. Cocktail parties don't have this much gladhanding at them.

The Barbecue Revolutions

It's taken them far too long, but this election has seen the punditocracy slowly move away from their favorite politician as they see the bankruptcy at work in his campaign style. The unending stream of lies and absurd justifications which are lies themselves (Palin didn't veto federal earmarks because no governor can do that) have taken their toll on McCain's special relationship with the media. I would expect the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to hit McCain in an editorial, arguing (correctly) that his attempts to rev up the culture war seem hollow in the face of the financial meltdown.

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite.

Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties" never sounded so up-to-date.

Americans don't mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists as long as they deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else down, Americans rise up in righteous anger. The New Deal political alignment endured for decades because the financial elites were so profoundly discredited by the Great Depression. The New Deal coalition dissolved only when prosperity began to seem durable and only after the GOP discovered the joys of baiting Hollywood, the media and the academy.

And I expect to see well-informed editorials from experts contrasting issues, like Barack Obama and John McCain's health care plans.

Sen. Obama's proposal will modernize our current system of employer- and government-provided health care, keeping what works well, and making the investments now that will lead to a more efficient medical system [...]

Given the current inefficiencies in our system, the impact of the Obama plan will be profound. Besides the $2,500 savings in medical costs for the typical family, according to our research annual business-sector costs will fall by about $140 billion. Our figures suggest that decreasing employer costs by this amount will result in the expansion of employer-provided health insurance to 10 million previously uninsured people.

In contrast, Sen. McCain, who constantly repeats his no-new-taxes promise on the campaign trail, proposes a big tax hike as the solution to our health-care crisis. His plan would raise taxes on workers who receive health benefits, with the idea of encouraging their employers to drop coverage. A study conducted by University of Michigan economist Tom Buchmueller and colleagues published in the journal Health Affairs suggests that the McCain tax hike will lead employers to drop coverage for over 20 million Americans.

(like I've said, this is the big under-the-radar issue in this election.)

But I did not expect this from Richard Cohen, who rhetorically lashes himself with a cat o' nine-tails.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

And Cohen is just an example of a series of columnists who have seen their fantasy world McCain float into the ether. It was never real, but they made themselves believe it. Now the ugliness of Republican electoral politics is on full display, the very tactics that McCain was supposedly against, and the pundits can't believe it. It does not compute. And slowly and gradually they're coming around to a reckoning with themselves.

So is John McCain's own cousin:

Jump ahead to the campaign Sen. McCain is currently running. Clearly, a lot can change in eight years. Our nation has gone from a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace to one marked by debt in the trillions of dollars, record foreclosures, and a global reputation for warmongering and neo-imperialism.

So, where is the straight-talking, commonsense John McCain of 2000? I'm afraid he is long gone, replaced by a desperate version of himself who seems to contradict nearly everything he once stood for.

What becomes apparent in his ideological about-face is just how out of touch McCain really is with America's working families.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the pundit class. I don't think they have much powers of persuasion anymore, but it's striking considering that this was McCain's base.

The Wrath Of New York Times Editorialists

Is it me, or have the columnist for the Times become strikingly more abrasive toward John McCain lately? Not just the ones you'd expect, like Frank Rich:

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

But the typically more sclerotic Bob Herbert has eaten his Wheaties:

Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?

Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination [...]

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

Even Republican David Brooks offers a throwaway line in an otherwise banal column that ought to prick up America's ears:

The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now, but balancing with Democrats, they might be able to do some good.

Editorialists from the NYT often appear on chattering class shows and other journalists look to them to understand the themes of the campaign. It'll be interesting to see if lines like "The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now" get repeated.

Why It's Rigged

We're finally getting around in the larger blogosphere to something I was flogging a few weeks ago - how the media is failing to apply the same standard to John McCain that they did to Al Gore in 2000.

It's completely clear that the McCain campaign is outright lying about Sarah Palin's opposition to the bridge to nowhere. It's almost comical how many news stories have debunked it (here's a pretty thorough list). And the Obama campaign is not being passive about it, either. Not in any way.

On the same day that dozens of news organizations have exposed Governor Palin's phony Bridge to Nowhere claim as a 'naked lie,' she and John McCain continue to repeat the claim in their stump speeches. Maybe tomorrow she'll tell us she sold it on eBay," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

And this is only one of a host of lies that McCain and Palin have uttered on the stump and in interviews. McCain, who has abandoned virtually every "maverick" instinct he's ever had, just yesterday blasted Obama for wanting to cancel a weapons system that he himself opposed just a few years ago. This has happened multiple times and it's not going to stop. In fact, Palin is STILL saying that she opposed the bridge to nowhere on the campaign trail. She's lied about it at least 23 times.

It's not going to stop because the media has not exacted a price for all the lying. They haven't built a "serial liar" narrative around John McCain the way they did around Al Gore, despite there being far more cause for one in this case. This is what Matt Yglesias was getting at yesterday with Marc Ambinder's blithely ignorant post wondering why the electorate doesn't penalize campaigns for lying. Yglesias correctly stated that the media doesn't penalize the campaigns, so why should the electorate, who's getting their cues from that same media? One-off stories debunking the lies are nice, but an overall narrative - which does exist - is the only thing that would do the trick in this case. In response, Ambinder said this:

...it must somehow be the press's fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don't realize that he's a lying liar, or whatever, [...] To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press -- well -- read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I'll abstain.

Ambinder is playing the conventional journalist's game of failing to recognize that the media is part of the story of campaigns. It's inescapable that they are the filter through which candidates must get out their message. And the hands-off approach they take, their unwillingness to referee on the side of the truth, hurts America.

If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to [...] This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it's important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn't stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that's also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

In a similar way, the press can't report that their corporate overseers play a significant role in shaping the news that we see. If you don't believe that, look at the MSNBC situation from yesterday. It's a cable network with a corporate parent that has found a niche generating cable news with a nominally liberal perspective, but it conflicts with the perceived rights and repsonsibilities of the corporate parent, so they must act against their financial interest and squash the nominal liberal perspective.

So they tie their own hands about a fundamental part of the campaign, something that really shapes public opinion on a variety of subjects. It really comes down to whether or not the grand poohbahs of the chattering class like the candidate. Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this.

It isn't particularly surprising that journalists view debates over their "duties and obligations" as sanctimonious, worthless, boring irritants -- a frivolous little "game" that is the last thing they're going to indulge. After all, they have campaign planes to catch, Steve Schmidt gossip to be dished along, petty scoops to uncover, and the daily drama of the election to be dissected. They're not going to be sidetracked from those fun and exciting pursuits by haughty objections from interlopers about the destructive role they're playing in our elections, or by ponderous debates from non-members about their so-called "obligations" to scrutinize candidates' claims and expose the falsehoods of political leaders. Please.

I do think that Democratic operatives embedded in the media, what few there are, have started to catch on to this, and maybe a constant haranguing can bring us to some kind of reckoning. Paul Begala does a good job here.

ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won't do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn't been tough enough. Barack's job is to run against John McCain, right. Don't shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media's job when a politician flat out lies like she's doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she's attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.

ROBERTS: Hey, OK. We got to let Alex respond to that. Flat out lies, Alex?

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let's be a little gentle. Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You just don't want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no. And she made it -

BEGALA: That's not true.

CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.

ROBERTS: All right.

BEGALA: That's just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There's lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government.

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.

There is going to be a lot of resistance to this. The Village establishment couldn't dare see themselves as biased arbiters and swayers of public opinion. They're just going to have to be called out. Repeatedly.

No excuses: Ron Fournier needs to be recused or fired

I don't think the enormity of Ron Fournier's hit piece on the Obama-Biden ticket can be fully appreciated. This story will be in every small-town paper, and quite a few big ones, by tomorrow. As newspapers reduce their staffs and rely more heavily on wire services, Fournier's reporting and his style as the Washington bureau chief will be more and more prominent. What's more the media swarm takes their cues from sources like the AP. Fournier is a Villager who needs to be cut down. Now.

Fournier's attack on the ticket - that Obama's pick displayed weakness, that he chose the status quo over a reinforcing pick - isn't the most egregious perspective in the world. Obama did fill the gaps in the resume. But as Steve Benen (in his new digs) notes, it was a lazy analysis:

First, on the substance, Fournier's analysis seems a little lazy. By his logic, any potential running mate shows a "lack of confidence" -- picking Hillary would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over women voters; picking Bayh would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over independents and conservative Dems; picking Webb would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over voters concerned about national security; picking Kaine would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over voters in the South; etc. For that matter, "the status quo" in Washington has been conservative Republican rule. Biden may be an old pro and a DC insider, but he's anything but "the status quo."

But much more important is Fournier's personal history with this campaign and these candidates. He famously told Karl Rove to "keep up the fight" while Pat Tillman's case was raging. He considered joining the McCain campaign earlier this year:

Before Ron Fournier returned to The Associated Press in March 2007, the veteran political reporter had another professional suitor: John McCain's presidential campaign.

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain's inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

He simply has no business covering the Presidential campaign. It's one thing for an openly conservative columnist - Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol - arguing against the Democratic nominee. It's another thing for a purportedly "objective" journalist, running the AP's Washington office at a time where the wire service has more influence than ever - offering a slanted take without disclosing his bias. The AP has a Ron Fournier problem, and now it's all of our problem.

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 [...]

The problem for Fournier is that the now-public email exchange with Rove simply amplifies long-running concerns about his political tilt and its manifestation in his work.

For instance, in the months before Fournier was privately bonding with Rove and urging the White House to "keep up the fight," this was the lead Fournier wrote for a straight-ahead news article about then-Democratic front-runner Howard Dean receiving Al Gore's endorsement:

Dean hopes the coveted endorsement eases concerns among party leaders about his lack of foreign policy experience, testy temperament, policy flip-flops, campaign miscues and edgy anti-war, antiestablishment message.

Gee, not many Rovian talking points embedded in that AP article, eh?

Boehlert's article is long and filled with material about Ron Fournier's biased reporting. Fournier even invented the idea that Al Gore "invented the Internet."

This is not something to be dismissed and I'm not the only one who thinks this. Ron Fournier is destroying the AP and driving the clubby, sneering, insider journalism that has damaged this country. He needs to be stopped. Jonathan Singer has the contact for the Associated Press and I expect a lot more actions on this in the coming days. For now...

Contact the Associated Press (updated)... Kathleen Carroll (Fournier's boss) at kcarroll@ap.org or (212) 621-1500. Be POLITE, but be FIRM. Let them know that you don't want to see them serve as stenographers and amplifiers for pure spin by the McCain campaign.

UPDATE: MoveOn jumps in.

This isn't an isolated incident for the AP reporter who wrote this story, Ron Fournier--who was recently appointed as the AP's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Media watchdog group Media Matters wrote a report showing that Fournier's presidential coverage has consistently smeared Democrats and favored John McCain.

Can you email AP reporter Ron Fournier and CC his boss, Managing Editor Mike Oreskes? Tell them that the public's faith in the 160-year-old AP will be gone if Ron Fournier is allowed to continue his slanted articles against Democrats and for McCain.

Here are their emails:

Michael Oreskes, AP Managing Editor, mOreskes@ap.org
Ron Fournier, AP reporter and Washington D.C. Bureau Chief, rfournier@ap.org
After you email them, please help us track our progress by reporting your email here:

link

UPDATE II: Jane at FDL has created a neat little letter to the editor tool that was very successful the last time they used it, generating 15,000 LTE's to a Nedra Pickler story earlier this year. And then there's this:

The Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated press, Ron Fournier, commands speaker's fees of up to $10,000 per appearance.

As of this writing, Fournier appears to available for booking through the All American Talent & Celebrity Network. I called to confirm that he was still listed with the agency, but I haven't heard back yet [...]

Here's AP's ethics policy on outside appearances:

OUTSIDE APPEARANCES:
Employees frequently appear on radio and TV news programs as panelists asking questions of newsmakers; such appearances are encouraged.

However, there is potential for conflict if staffers are asked to give their opinions on issues or personalities of the day. Advance discussion and clearance from a staffer's supervisor are required.

Employees must inform a news manager before accepting honoraria and/or reimbursement of expenses for giving speeches or participating in seminars at colleges and universities or at other educational events if such appearance makes use of AP's name or the employee represents himself or herself as an AP employee. No fees should be accepted from governmental bodies; trade, lobbying or special interest groups; businesses, or labor groups; or any group that would pose a conflict of interest. All appearances must receive prior approval from a staffer's supervisor.

A shill and a cheat.

Kewl Kidz

Setting aside the merits of Joe Biden for a second, late last night as the news nets were announcing the pick David Shuster said something like "Barack Obama has now betrayed his supporters by not giving them the first opportunity to hear his choice..."

Simply an amazing statement on a variety of levels. Actually, who betrayed the public is you, the media, again, because you just couldn't stand not being insiders for ten minutes and waiting out the pick and maybe using those resources of staking out potential candidates' homes and working the phones on, I don't know, illegal wars and torture. The press only breaks out their investigative skills every four years so they can scoop their competition by 20 seconds. Would it have killed them to embargo the story and let the campaign play it out the way they wanted? Would it have mattered to anyone?

This secret was so tantalizing to them, making it necessary to marshal the full resources of the American media, while eight years of secret government and secret law received no such attention. The discovery of the pick was an end in itself, justifying their clubby, insider self-images as the coolest kids in the room. And then, after they've undermined the rollout, they blame the candidate.

It's going to get lost because it happened so late at night, but it was a shining example of how the media works.

...Brilliant. The LA Times ran with a Tim Kaine pick (they got it right in the print edition). They broke their word to their subscribers!

Wouldn't Want A Leftward Drift!

It's totally absurd that the media critics far and wide have come out of the woodwork to cluck their tongues and shake their heads at MSNBC's decision to give Rachel Maddow a prime-time show, on the ground that it could reflect a dangerous leftward drift (because liberals don't watch news shows). This is the same so-called liberal media that has seen cable shows from Tucker Carlson (conservative), Joe Scarborough (conservative ex-Congressman), Glenn Beck (batshit crazy wingnut), Michael Savage (scumbag wingnut), Alan Keyes (crazy scumbag wingnut conservative), Sean Hannity (see above), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), etc., etc. Now one liberal finally gets a show and this could cause a dangerous imbalance in the force. (I consider Olbermann more of a Bush-hater than an actual liberal). Glenn Greenwald demolishes this argument quickly and quietly.

For years, cable news -- well beyond just Fox -- has been suffuse with the hardest-right ideologues. Virtually every Karl Rove disciple not formally with the McCain campaign is now employed in some capacity in the media. Dan Bartlett just joined CBS News as a "political analyst", and just today, Time announced that it has hired Mike Murphy, GOP strategist and former chief McCain adviser, as a new columnist and new poster at Swampland, and he promptly wrote a column filled with trite Rovian platitudes about how Obama is "irresistible to the wine-and-cheese lovers" but can't connect with the salt-of-the-earth working-class People because Obama "reminds them of the Ivy League whiz kids they've dealt with at work during the latest downsizing." [...]

Maddow is unquestionably one of the smartest and most incisive commentators anywhere on television -- perhaps the smartest. One would think that the presence of smart commentary in the wasteland known as "cable news" would be cause for celebration among those super-Serious intellects at TNR. Zimmerman even brings herself to recognize that Maddow's "no mere histrionic provocateur" and "has proved herself to be a savvy commentator with quick, smart takes on the news of the day." But no matter. She's a liberal -- and, therefore, to the Tucker-Carlson-loving Sacha Zimmermans of the world, her mere presence is likely to infect and degrade our political discourse with shrill, overheated, fringe, sickly partisan rhetoric -- "refusing to acknowledge anything but spite, paranoia, and conspiracy theory when it comes to the other side."

The reaction to Maddow's show highlights just how suffocatingly narrow, and right-wing, the spectrum of mainstream political discourse in America is. Hiring Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson to host their own shows didn't jeopardize NBC's news brand, just as giving Glenn Beck -- Glenn Beck -- his own show didn't jeopardize CNN's. Most mainstream political and media figures even continue to insist that Fox is a legitimate news organization because Brit Hume confines his overt right-wing talking points to the Sunday show. But the presence of a liberal on MSNBC instantaneously destroys traditional principles of Journalism.

This is going to be appointment television for liberals, and the ratings are almost sure to go up in the time slot. But the fear and loathing over Maddow's ascension has little to do with ratings. It's about genuinely progressive ideas and perspectives "infecting the discourse," as it were. Now, the chattering class does a pretty good job of neatly avoiding whatever Olbermann puts on his show and ensuring none of it shapes the narrative. With Maddow there as well that will get slightly more difficult, but only slightly so. This will be a 2-hour island on a sea of conventional wisdom and rigid narrative.

I will note that the Finemans and Alters of the world who come on with Olbermann do end up reflecting the viewpoint of the host. A lot of them are just eager to please, anyway. So more liberals they might have to curry favor with in order to stay on the air might be a good thing. Whether it gets reflected in the broader narrative, I'm not sure.

The POW Card

This really is quite amazing. I didn't imagine that every response, every excuse by the McCain campaign would be tied to his POW service, all the while keeping up the fiction that he's reluctant to talk about it. But that's exactly what's happened, to an embarrassing degree.

Speaking to the Washington Post, aide Brian Rogers, in full damage-control mode, acknowledged that his boss had "some investment properties and stuff," but added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison."

That the McCain campaign could incorporate his service in Vietnam into a campaign spat over his property portfolio is not so surprising. The Senator has, rightfully or not, used his history as a POW shrewdly and repeatedly throughout this campaign. Earlier this week, for instance, amidst speculation that the Senator may have received in advance the questions to a values forum between him and Obama, spokeswoman Nicole Wallace declared: "The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous."

When Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Senator John Edwards, ridiculed McCain's health care policy, his aides didn't respond with a substantive retort. Rather, they declared that their boss knew what it was like to get inadequate care "from another government." Even earlier, when the topic was about earmarks, McCain criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing funds for a museum celebrating Woodstock. He didn't know what there was to celebrate, he said, because he was "tied up" during the music festival.

The Senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, he offered that his knowledge of music "stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile." Dancing Queen, however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain's plane was shot down.

There are a dozen more of these. And it's actually offensive at this point. Brandon Friedman at VoteVets has had enough.

1. Being a POW is not an excuse for everything.

The bottom line is that we're sick of hearing about this as a justification for everything John McCain does or doesn't do. This instance is only the latest example, as others have noted.

The fact is, John McCain's service during Vietnam was honorable and he sacrificed a great deal. But his service to the country carries no more weight than that of any other POW. Likewise, while McCain has given so much to his country, thousands of veterans--past and present--have given as much or more. In this war alone, thousands of troops have lost limbs, been paralyzed, and been burned beyond recognition. So to see McCain resort to playing the POW card when answering legitimate questions, in my mind, cheapens that experience. And by cheapening his own experience in war, he degrades all of our experiences in war. He turns the horrific incidents we've all seen, touched, smelled, and felt into a lame excuse to earn political points. And it dishonors us all [...]

But there's also another issue here:

2. Thousands of veterans are homeless--that is, they have ZERO homes.

John McCain seems to forget that while he and his wife own at least eight houses, there are currently over 150,000 homeless vets on America's streets. The only "houses" they own are cardboard boxes under a bridge. Many of these vets served alongside John McCain in Vietnam. Some might have even been POWs. Either way, thousands of them have suffered immeasurably overseas, in the service of their country.

It's really crazy and it's reaching the level of out-and-out parody. Every time anything happens to McCain, troll liberal blog comments and you'll get half a dozen "but he was a POW!" If that acerbic stance goes mainstream, forget it. McCain is shot. I can't believe he's still trying this.

But it's just like a loudmouth pundit to have absolutely no self-awareness.

...I guess some in the media are defending McCain on this, and that's no surprise: he's one of them.

Why do the media idiots love him? Because he’s one of them.

Why do they give him a pass on his totally fraudulent references to elitism? Because they do that shit all the time.

Why do they love his insanity-based foreign policy? Because he says all the absurd, superficially strong-sounding stuff that makes good TV.

They love him like Chris Matthews loved Tim Russert. They love him like David Brooks loves Tom Friedman loves Richard Cohen loves Fred Hiatt. They love him like the Slate editorial board loves any idiot with a contrary position. They would go to bat for him because it’s tribal, because they get him, on a fundamental level. He’s good TV people. He’s one of them.

Keep defending him, guys. And make sure you repeat the quote when you do it. Because you don't actually have a whole lot of credibility anyway, and as long as you mention clearly that John McCain doesn't know how many houses he has, people will get the message.

Russia/Georgia Update

Meanwhile, in the most elongated cease-fire in history, it looks, shall we say, unlikely that Russia's leaving.

Russia plans to establish a long-term presence in Georgia and one of its breakaway republics by adding 18 checkpoints, including at least eight within undisputed Georgian territory outside the pro-Russian enclave of South Ossetia, a ranking Russian military official told reporters Wednesday.

The checkpoints will be staffed by hundreds of Russian troops, the official said, and those within Georgia proper will have supplies ferried to them from breakaway South Ossetia.

If implemented, the plan would in effect put under Russian control the border between Georgia and the South Ossetia region, which is seeking independence, as well as a small chunk of Georgia proper.

If we had a news media that was in any way curious, the upshot here would be what McClatchy is saying - that for all the tough talk, all the bluster, the West is essentially impotent when it comes to Russia, especially in the current posturing of pure belligerence. McCain may have play-acted like Gen. Patton and acted like a hothead, but the result was negligible. I mean, what are we going to do, boycott the Olympics in 6 years?

Basically, Mikhail Saakashvili can get his own cable show and it won't matter at all. The Bush/McCain hothead approach to foreign policy yields nothing. In fact, Max Bergmann had the best take.

Each of those statements from McCain sound like they came from an excited media pundit. Well that’s because they did.

McCain’s approach and tone on foreign policy has always been more emblematic of a tv pundit rather than a sober president. While McCain has attacked Obama as the "celebrity" candidate, the fact is that a bad place to be over the last 25 years has been between John McCain and a TV camera. The New York Times on Sunday noted that one of the first things McCain did after 9-11 was go on just about every TV program - where he incidentally called for attacking about four countries. In its biographical series profiling the candidates the Times also noted that McCain was attracted to the celebrity of the Senate with one close associate noting that McCain “saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.” McCain clearly enjoys being on television and he has been a constant commentator on the Sunday news shows and the evening talk news programs.

But TV appearances encourage sound bites, over-the-top rhetoric, and good one-liners, not reasoned and nuanced diplomatic language. This is especially true from guests who are not in the current administration, since you are less likely to get invited back on Face the Nation if you down play a crisis or take a boring nuanced position. Thus on almost every crisis or incident over the last decade, McCain has sounded the alarm, ratcheted up the rhetoric and often called for military action - with almost no regards to the practical implications of such an approach.

And TV pundits make lots of money and maybe don't know how many homes they own, but they don't make for an attractive Presidency. McCain is the O'Reilly of politics.

...Mikhail Gorbachev had some interesting thoughts on the conflict.