"The idea that this can be written out of history, that it was on Cheney and Bush's watch that the biggest domestic attack of our lifetime happened and that somehow that's off the ledger -- we'll just begin the accounting on September 12th, 2011 -- It's so preposterous and it's amazing to me the extent to which in sort of normal public discourse they kind of get away with it."
-- Frank Rich on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, commenting on Dick Cheney's positively laughable criticism of the Obama Administration's performance during the Benghazi attack, which happened on September 11th of last year
Here was Cheney's exact quote, if you haven't seen it yet: "When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary."
For the record, when Cesca brought this up yesterday on the podcast, it was the only time I've ever expressed such utter, audible frustration that it actually made Bob laugh. It's fucking incomprehensible that, as Rich says, these idiots can continue to arrogantly strut and make the ludicrous claim that they "kept us safe" when the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history happened while they were in office. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, by the logic they consistently use you could easily argue that Hitler was a pretty good guy to the Jews as long as you don't count that nasty Holocaust thing.
This isn't a matter of politics. This is objective fact and an insult to your, my, and all of our intelligence. The idea that we're expected to ignore the original 9/11 when we consider the Bush Administration's record of keeping Americans safe requires a kind of suspension of disbelief on our part -- and chutzpah on theirs -- that normal, non-sociopathic human beings are simply incapable of.
By the way, Maddow's entire takedown of the Republican conspiracy machine on her show last night was one for the ages.
"We’re what needs to be fixed in the Republican party? Seriously?"
-- Rachel Maddow on RNC Chairman Reince Priebus's claim that Republicans had so much trouble in the 2012 election because of MSNBC and the way it hosted presidential debates
And here I thought MSNBC was a non-entity that could be easily dismissed -- a bunch of liberal losers who pose no threat to Fox News's domination and the GOP's messaging stranglehold.
"They keep making this case in public because it has important policy consequences for them. You see, if you can't get pregnant by being raped then anybody who is pregnant by definition was not raped. It could not have been a rape; no matter what you say you must have wanted it if you ended up pregnant. And if you wanted it there's no reason to feel sorry for you and let you end this pregnancy. You should have thought about that before you lured your supposed rapist to do this thing that you obviously secretly wanted. What was the line there? 'To get pregnant takes a little cooperation.' So we know you secretly wanted it otherwise you wouldn't be pregnant and we wouldn't now be talking about what the government is going to force you to do with regard to your pregnancy."
-- Rachel Maddow, brilliantly turning the argument around, exposing the true motives of those pushing the false claim that women who are raped can't get pregnant and basically annihilating the anti-abortion legislation crowd
Seriously, set aside twenty minutes and watch this.
The Full Piece that Ran Yesterday at the Daily Banter
In case you missed it, Rachel Maddow handed Alex Castellanos his ass this past Sunday morning. It happened on Meet the Press during a debate over whether the Republicans are currently engaged in a legislative “war” on America’s women. While I’m not a big fan of calling what the GOP is doing an all-out war -- only because I feel like that term has been run into the ground — there’s no doubt that what we’re seeing from the right at the moment is the latest fusillade in an ongoing push to turn back the clock to time when women were largely free to come and go as they pleased but were also fully aware of their place beneath the white guy power structure. They were often highly regarded, but their rights were still little more than the largess of the real people in charge -- which is the definition of condescension.
Speaking of which, it took all of a couple of seconds into the discussion for Alex Castellanos’s big orange face to contort into a smug smirk and for him to begin patronizing the hell out of Rachel Maddow, and needless to say Maddow wasn’t having any of it. First, Castellanos tried to interrupt her several times and did it in a manner that seemed to suggest that he and his hyper-Republican take on things should be the objects of deference because, well, they represented obvious common sense. To her credit, Maddow didn’t make it personal and firmly asserted that she be allowed to finish her point despite Castellanos’s supposedly uncharacteristic behavior as someone she considered a friend. Castellanos followed that up by filibustering on the ways in which the Democrats are creating wedge issues designed to pit various groups of Americans against each other because they don’t have any strong policy points to stand on or victories to tout. Yeah, he said that with a straight face.
What’s interesting, though, isn’t the fact that Castellanos proved once again that he’s a shameless turd who’s really in no position to lecture anyone on political ethics -- it’s the deft way that Maddow smacked him down, using not empty rhetoric or robotic talking points but indisputable facts and figures. She used math, which made her wide-eyed shock understandable when Castellanos actually did dispute it all -- when he took issue with proven reality. We’ve seen that kind of thing before from the right, but it’s still an astonishing sight to behold.
Over the past couple of weeks on the podcast and radio show Bob Cesca and I do, we’ve discussed the role of progressive commentators on Fox News -- more to the point, the kind of progressive they always seem to trot out to supposedly counterbalance the army of right-wing blowhards that are Fox’s stock-in-trade. Bottom line: liberals on Fox News are always tomato cans. They’re either pencil-necked weenie clichés like Alan Colmes -- who’s certainly a bright guy, but one sure to confirm every preconceived image the NASCAR Nation has about progressives -- or they’re slovenly, slow-witted schlubs like Bob Beckel, a guy who always looks like he’s one step away from wetting his Depends when he goes on one of his rants after being ganged up on by the cast of reactionary doofs on The Five. Fox knows full well that if it brought a Rachel Maddow or a Thom Hartmann on to debate a clown like Greg Gutfeld or Steve Doocy, it’d be a massacre -- one Fox News couldn’t prevent or deflect short of pulling the plug on the camera and putting up color bars.
Why? Because as I’ve said many times lately -- what should really be a Democratic campaign slogan somewhere -- the Republicans have nothing. They’ve got nothing. They don’t have a thing in the way of policy other than screwing a substantial portion of the American public while standing obstinately against anything and everything President Obama wants. They’ve got horseshit bumper sticker sloganeering and shameless fear mongering aimed squarely at aging white people who feel like they’re losing the country bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers. They’ve got a pervading desire to re-fight culture battles long-since decided in the minds of most Americans and in doing so to return this country to some hyper-idealized version of what we were in the 1950s.
And when it comes to the ubiquitous mainstream media pundits who act as political surrogates for their cause, they’ve got people who either support them in a full-throated manner or who simply enable them by being largely impotent. At least that’s what we see on many so-called news networks -- and that’s why it’s so important when people like Rachel Maddow beat the living hell out of hacks like Alex Castellanos on national television. She proved that when it comes to actual facts, the GOP these days doesn’t have a leg to stand on, regardless of how hard it and its advocates may try to prop it up. The more honest -- and uninterrupted -- interaction that people like Maddow have with the pundits and politicians the Republicans send out to speak for them, the more it’ll be shown to everyone just how flimsy their case is to the American people.
My latest piece for the Daily Banter is now up -- it deals with Rachel Maddow's deft smackdown of vaudevillian hack Alex Castellanos on Meet the Press this past weekend, and why we don't see more of that on network and cable television but should.
Here's the opening shot:
"In case you missed it, Rachel Maddow handed Alex Castellanos his ass this past Sunday morning. It happened on Meet the Press during a debate over whether the Republicans are currently engaged in a legislative 'war' on America’s women. While I’m not a big fan of calling what the GOP is doing an all-out war — only because I feel like that term has been run into the ground — there’s no doubt that what we’re seeing from the right at the moment is the latest fusillade in an ongoing push to turn back the clock to time when women were largely free to come and go as they pleased but were also fully aware of their place beneath the white guy power structure. They were often highly regarded, but their rights were still little more than the largess of the real people in charge — which is the definition of condescension."
"Defendents NBC and MSNBC pride themselves on their marketing of anti-religious beliefs and their disparagement of people of faith, as they have sought to woo secular, atheist, leftist oriented viewer markets, given Fox News' domination of the politically conservative/libertarian/religious markets which they have had difficulty cultivating."
-- From a $50 million lawsuit being filed by "metalhead minister" Bradlee Dean against Rachel Maddow, whom he accuses of defaming his "fine reputation" by playing a tape of an appearance on talk radio in which he said that Muslim nations that execute gays are more righteous than the American Christians who tolerate them
A pretty good rule of thumb: If you can't spell "defendant" properly in your lawsuit, it's a safe bet it isn't going anywhere.
On the plus side, one look at Bradlee answers a question I've been pondering for years: What finally happened to all those hair-band idiots in The Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years who kept insisting that they were gonna make it in the music business?
"Democrats have not only refused to hold Republicans accountable for the double standard, but they have joined with Republicans in piling on with the demands that Anthony Weiner had to resign even as David Vitter stays in the Senate... Anthony Weiner, who was not accused of corruption, who does not appear to have done anything illegal, who does not even appear to have had sex with any of the women with any of the people with whom he had scandalous talk and picture-taking, for him a line was drawn... If the key to ending somebody's career is not the severity of their bad behavior but rather how much press coverage you can generate about any level of bad behavior then congratulations, Democrats. In an era of unhinged, ideological, big money conservative media that is wholly and admittedly divorced from the precepts of journalism, in hounding Anthony Weiner into resigning ... you have just fed and unleashed this beast against yourselves, probably for a generation."
-- Rachel Maddow
I think that Weiner resigning was probably the right thing to do given the circumstances, but that's just it -- given the circumstances. As Cenk Uygur, much to his credit, points out perfectly in the above clip, the Weiner scandal was sure to be a distraction for the Democrats for a while, but only because they'd allow it to be. I still maintain that eventually everyone would have moved on, but I can't help but think that the Republicans likely would've forgotten about it long before Weiner's own party did -- because as we all know, nobody knows how to do the job of their political adversaries for them like Democrats. This is the issue I've had with the Dems since day one, and it's something I've written about over and over again: they have no idea how to pull together, circle the wagons, fight to the death and stay on message the way the Republicans do, which is why the GOP tends to kick their collective, self-defeating ass again and again. There really is no better example of the vast difference between Republican internal politics and Democratic internal politics than the fact that David Vitter is still in office and Anthony Weiner isn't.
The Democrats have always been their own worst enemy -- and they just go right on proving it.
Between Maddow's perfectly tuned outrage and this little item from yesterday -- touting yet another bullet-meet-foot "revolt" by liberals at Netroots Nation against Barack Obama -- it's time to once again bring back a piece from late 2009. It bothers me to no end that this sucker holds up so well.
"With Friends Like These..." (Originally Posted, 8.21.09)
"So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back."
-- Paul Krugman in an editorial in today's New York Times
I'm not one of those people who listens to right-wing radio, even occasionally, looking for something to piss him off. If I wanted to make myself angry for no good reason, I'd call my estranged wife -- or maybe put on a Phish record.
That said, I was flipping through Sirius XM radio a couple of days ago when I stumbled across the America Right or "Patriot Radio" channel. The show that happened to be on at the time was something called The Wilkow Majority (I'll give you a minute to shake your head at the right's ongoing and obligatory need to cast itself in the most muscular terms possible) hosted by a guy named Andrew Wilkow. What separates Wilkow from the rest of the crazy-come-latlies out there in conservative radioland is his belief that he's, well, a punk.
I'm not kidding.
Both Wilkow and his producer, an at one time faux-hawk-sporting kid named Nick Rizzuto, have gotten it through their heads that they're the personification of the right's new school -- and that the new school they represent also happens to be the logical next step in the evolution of punk. They've even started a website called "Conservative Punk." If this sounds fucking laughable, believe me -- it is. Do yourself a favor and don't think too hard about trying to fit the square peg of punk rock culture into the round hole of unabashed capitalism and conservatism; I tried for awhile and it only made my head hurt. Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins are turning over in their graves at this ridiculous conceit and they're not even dead yet. You almost have to give credit to the right's lack of shame when it comes to attempting to co-opt some of the better trends of the left while forcibly trading off its own misdeeds, clumsily trying to shove them under the banner of its enemy and hoping that no one notices how full of shit the whole notion is (Hitler was a leftist, racism is a liberal ideal, etc.).
Needless to say, neither Andrew Wilkow nor his remora, Nick Rizzuto, is a punk. To twist a somewhat legendary phrase: Boys, I grew up with punks. I was good friends with punks. I was a punk (and according to some, still am). You're no fucking punks.
The reality is that, after taking a quick glance at his website, Wilkow looks like he could be just about any other right-wing talking head. This is especially amusing when you consider the fact that he is actually quite a bit younger than the usual suspects and yet still looks like your basic perpetually middle-aged white guy who hasn't been blown since college. I guess that's what being Sean Hannity's hand-picked protege does to you. (Now's a good time to once again remind you that a guy who counts his introduction to Hannity among the greatest moments in his life also considers himself an up-the-establishment standard bearer of punk rock's new blood. You've gotta be fucking kidding me.)
All very easy shots at Wilkow and his show aside, though, I have to admit that while listening to him for a few minutes the other day, he made a surprisingly good point -- one that I sort of made here earlier in the week. I guess we're both on the same "Punk Rock Manifesto Weekly" mailing list.
The Wilkow rant in question had to do with the tendency of liberals to seemingly revel in martyrdom and self-sabotage -- their propensity to almost embrace their roles as losers and to be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of even the most assured victory. The crux of his argument was this: The Democrats have near-complete control of the government right now -- from the White House to the Hill. Legislation-wise, they can accomplish practically anything they set out to, and yet they're somehow content to bitch, moan and blame Republicans for standing in the way of progress when in reality no one's completely blocking their path. Worse than all of that, and this is something Wilkow didn't broach but I will: Liberals can't help fighting amongst themselves. It's as if it's ingrained in their DNA to never completely agree on anything. And we've all seen how well that strategy works when it comes to pushing through an agenda or, you know, winning elections.
A couple of days ago I published a piece decrying the Democrats for not being willing to take off the gloves and get their hands a little dirty when it comes to battling the Republican noise machine trying to thwart them at every turn. My point was that there won't be much solace in being able to say, "Well, at least we stuck to the ideals that make us better than the GOP automatons," four years from now if nothing got done and a Republican president is back in office. I'm not saying that there can't and won't be disagreement and dissent; I'm saying that in order to get the job done and give Barack Obama the clout he needs to move his agenda forward by leaps and bounds, there has to be, to a large extent, a united front to face the consistently united front staring you down from the other side of the aisle. To paraphrase The Godfather, as far as outsiders are concerned, you never take sides against the family.
Sure this is slightly robotic and seems to stand against everything left-wing America stands for, but guess what? It fucking wins.
Sometimes you've gotta look at the big picture -- and if there's anyone who can't seem to do that because they're too busy picking every little thing apart just to prove how intellectual, analytical and multi-faceted they are, it's liberals.
First of all, let me state unequivocally that Krugman's a genius; he's one of the smartest people around, and his views are always worth listening to. Let me also make it clear that I'm not suggesting that any side of the political spectrum let its leaders get away with anything and everything. The good of the nation should, for all intents and purposes, trump the good of the party. My argument is that the battle lines are so clearly drawn these days, the alternative for either party is so far removed from its own desired reality for the country, that each side has to be willing to accept that a big picture victory, even a partial one, is infinitely better than a complete loss. The Republicans realize this; the Democrats seem not to. Krugman's editorial, which takes President Obama to task for supposedly betraying the progressive base that helped put him in office, is a perfect example of the self-defeating splinter cell tendency of left-wing politics. Yes, Barack Obama seems to have slipped comfortably into a more middle-of-the-road stance than much of the left-leaning electorate would've liked, but make no mistake: a New York Times editorial from one of the leading liberal voices in America declaring that Obama has lost the support of progressives and now has to earn it back accomplishes nothing aside from doing the job of Republican strategists for them.
An editorial like Krugman's is every conservative's wet dream -- because those on the right know that any well-publicized dissension within the Democratic ranks makes Obama look weak and proves their point to those on the fence: that even when the Democrats have what they need to run the government their way, they can't make it happen. They can't seal the deal, despite having everything on their side.
As Wilkow said, they're born losers.
Right about now, the Democrats need to take a hint from a recent song by Green Day: Know Your Enemy. At the very least, know who he is.
Of course, Green Day actually have something in common with Andrew Wilkow: They're not real punks either.
Chances are by now you've seen or heard what can only be described as the awesomely surreal release issued by Newt Gingrich's press secretary Rick Tyler a couple of days ago. The statement was a response to the battering Gingrich has taken following a slew of choice public missteps during the past week, not the least of which was his criticism of the Paul Ryan budget -- what was swiftly chuckled at by the press and was even more swiftly labeled apostasy by those who've proudly passed the required 2012 Republican Purity Test.
If by some fluke you haven't yet experienced Camp Gingrich's official counter-attack, it's -- colorful. Actually, what it is is an epically florid piece of melodrama that casts Gingrich -- a man whose decades of Beltway self-pampering couldn't manifest themselves more gruesomely in his doughy physique -- as an Aragorn-like hero, valiantly slicing through a tidal wave of oncoming orcs with blades made of pure testosterone as Sauron rains snarky blog posts down from the fiery plume atop Mount Doom (or Capitol Hill, which is basically the same thing).
Really, it has to be seen to be believed -- and needless to say everybody has had fun with it over the past 48 hours simply because it's so rare that political PR hackery rises to this level of, well, poetry.
"The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces."
And this was Colbert's take on it last night -- with a little help in the ACTING! department from John Lithgow:
For my part, as I re-read Tyler's press release a couple of times, I felt like I'd heard it somewhere before. That comically exaggerated style of prose -- it just sounded so familiar.
And then it hit me. Rick Tyler is just a nom de plume...
"Her Mind Is Aglow with Whirling, Transient Nodes of Thought Careening Through a Cosmic Vapor of Invention" (Originally Published, 3.25.10)
You know, I have to admit, I sat up pretty late last night trying to come up with something clever to do with this item.
I thought maybe I'd do a "Hannah Giles Orders Take-Out Chinese" theme, which would feature the bikini-clad Princess Leia to Andrew Breitbart's Jabba the Hutt -- Hannah Giles -- using all sorts of flowery metaphors and generally ostentatious vocabulary in the pursuit of the most mundane of tasks. Or maybe a fake ad for the "Hannah Giles School of Creative Writing," which would ostensibly offer to teach the neophyte the kind of poetic mastery of the English language that Hannah makes seem so effortless.
But it was Simon Owens over at Bloggasm who made me realize that you really can't beat up on Hannah Giles and feel good about it. She's just a dumb kid who got in way over her head. Yeah, she played an all-too-willing role in pretend provocateur James O'Keefe's ridiculous "take down" of ACORN -- a toothless non-profit that could barely afford to keep its fucking lights on, much less act as some sort of left-wing mafia enforcer; and sure, she really seemed to enjoy riding the wave and bathing in all the warm encomia from the right that followed her and Jimmy's little sting. But in the end, what the conservative media did to her was, ironically, what you'd expect to see done to the character she played in the now famous videos. They used her -- like a prostitute. Everybody did, to some extent.
So no, I'm not gonna pile on. That said, she does at least deserve to have the piece she penned for Breitbart's Big Journalism site regarding the dismantling of ACORN as a national organization -- her humorously florid pep talk to Right America about the need to keep fighting the good fight -- circulated far and wide. It's, well -- colorful.
Here's a chunk of it:
"Let me tell you something: If you know what is right, if you know what is pure, and if you can but for a second imagine attaining and sharing those things, then you must will all your power seek it out. If you do not, then the memory of that moment you imagined will forever itch inside your head and ache inside your heart until you are ruled by fear and tormented by regret...
We live in a quick cruel world that demands we bolt out of dreamland and wipe nostalgia’s sweet kisses away. Principles and beliefs are ageless only so long as those who possess them see to it they are not forgotten. Societies will always tend towards all things bad if the powers-at-be do not lead wisely and are not held accountable by the people.
The future is a blank canvas, a giant glowing question mark held in place by eternity. This is something that would send most people into a tailspin of wonder ,anxiety and fear. But to others, this makes life a bit simpler, an unknown future ought allow us to fully operate and thoroughly enjoy the present moment.
Challenge: take a step back and look at life on the Grand Scale. We are but specks of dust, here today gone tomorrow. What kind of spec are you going to be: The kind that gets swept under the rug? Or the mote that flies into the eye of deceit, threatening to agitate it beyond repair and forcing it to submit to truths brutally thorough cleansings?"
So, yeah. See, here I am -- not piling on at all.
Incidentally, the responses to the piece in the comment section are what you might expect:
"This lady can write. This has to be some of the most profoundly stirring prose I've read in some time."
-- impeach them all
"Great writing Hannah! You are truly an inspiration to me! I'll do what I can to be that "fly in the eye of deceit" from this end. I know you'll hold up yours! God bless you. God bless James. I have every confidence that we will win this war against this President of 'God damn America' Barack Hussein Obama and his comrades who are trying to enact a coup d'etat on America. Darkness is always overcome by the light."
-- Once always a marine
And with that, I'm doing what anyone in my position would do -- taking my laptop outside and ceremonially setting it on fire. Just not sure I'll ever be able to reach the lofty standards set by Cormac Giles there, so I don't see why I should even bother anymore.
At first glance this sounds like nothing more than a half-baked conspiracy theory -- until you actually read through the legislation itself and see just how much power it puts in the hands of one person and one party. I wish there weren't precedent for this sort of opportunistic power-grab, but unfortunately there's quite a bit of it.
"Michele Bachmann is not the national spokesperson for the Republican Party. She is unlikely anytime soon to be chosen to be the spokesperson for her party. But tonight, inexplicably, a national news network decided that they would give Michele Bachmann a job that her own party never did. (It's) a remarkable act of journalistic intervention to elevate, in effect, a group with which they are co-sponsoring a presidential debate... to the level of the major parties in this country. (CNN) decided tonight not to just cover the news about the State of the Union, they decided to make their own."
-- Rachel Maddow on CNN's decision to air Michele Bachmann's rebuttal to last night's State of the Union address
As expected, there was Barack Obama, bringing you America's Sputnik Moment.
And Michele Bachmann -- bringing you America's Stupnik Moment.
Last night I got an e-mail that was cc'd to about 50 or so indiscriminate addresses; it seemed to be trying to find its way into the hands of, among others, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Matt Drudge, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, O'Reilly's little Renfield-like producer Jesse Watters, Dana Milbank at the Post, and, yes, Keith Olbermann. What it contained was a link to a blog post currently running over at Newsbusters -- the right-wing media watchdog site created by professional uptight pencil-dick Brent Bozell -- which claimed that a Huffington Post contributor had inadvertently pulled back the curtain on MSNBC's prime time operation and admitted the ugly truth about it.
Can you figure out where this is going?
Yeah -- that Huffington Post contributor was me.
The post was written by Jack Coleman, whom I've never met and who may be a decent-enough guy for all I know, and it essentially used one line from the piece I put together on Olbermann's suspension last week to make a point I guess he felt needed to be made -- one which, not surprisingly, confirms what I have to assume are his own firmly-held biases.
Here's what he wrote:
"Wow, how'd that one slip through?
Writing about Keith Olbermann's 'indefinite suspension'/extended weekend away from MSNBC, Huffington Post blogger Chez Pazienza provided a rare moment of illumination at the left-wing site when he wrote this in a post titled 'Playing for Keith' --
'NBC's dilemma has always been how to draw the line between the outspoken free-for-all on MS and the supposedly dignified proceedings at NBC News proper. Maybe this will be the event that finally forces the NBC suits to fess up and admit what everybody already knows: MSNBC prime time isn't a news block; it's opinion. (emphasis added) And there's nothing really wrong with that.'"
Coleman goes on to make the claim -- and I feel like he really has to reach for it -- that the above quote somehow refutes Rachel Maddow's entire argument that MSNBC is, at its core, a news operation which traffics in facts (as opposed to Fox News, which she says is almost strictly a tool for partisan propaganda). Apparently, my willingness to state pretty categorically that MSNBC's prime time eschews traditional objective newscasting in favor of editorializing -- and that this fact should be fairly obvious to anyone with a set of ears and two brain cells to rub together -- makes me akin to Joshua's trumpet, bringing down the walls of Jericho.
This of course is horseshit.
I won't dare say I was misquoted or that my comment was taken out of context because each of those is a tired conceit, but thankfully I don't really have to bother going that route; any idiot can see the point I was making. Just because something or someone traffics largely in opinion doesn't mean that the opinions being expressed aren't based on actual facts. Maddow's argument in response to Olbermann's suspension was a good one -- that the system of checks and balances in place at NBC News was designed to ensure that those who worked for the network adhered to the highest journalistic standards. Yes, a new generation and a new paradigm now bends and even breaks those rules -- and that's a good thing -- but the fact that they exist at all proves that NBC ostensibly gives a crap about being fair. I have no doubt that Fox News also has some set of standards in place, and that perhaps at one time it even mattered. But if the network brass used to be able to make the argument that, yes, Fox's prime time could occasionally be an editorial Thunderdome but its daytime programming was always straight down the middle -- "fair and balanced," as it were -- that time has long since passed; Fox's blatant and oppressive partisan bias infects so much of what it does on a daily, hourly basis that it's simply impossible to take seriously as a responsible news network anymore.
While Keith Olbermann managed to get himself in trouble for making private campaign contributions to a couple of political candidates he happens to agree with -- Fox News employs as contributors and gives a public forum day after day after day to the political candidates and prospective political candidates it happens to agree with. It not only funds the campaigns of those running for office under the Republican and Tea Party banner (to say nothing of helping to foment the Tea Party movement by promoting and sponsoring its rallies); it reaps a financial reward of its own -- via ratings-based ad revenue -- from putting these people on the air, creating an Ouroboros in which politics and the media are interchangeable head and tail.
MSNBC is a news operation that features a well-defined block of advocacy and opinion, which means that news is still at the core of what it does.
Fox is a non-stop engine of advocacy and opinion that occasionally sprinkles in some actual news, which means that bias is always at the core of what it does.
Both have their share of booming partisan voices, but there is a damn huge difference.
By now you're almost certainly aware that on Friday, MSNBC announced that it was suspending Keith Olbermann indefinitely and without pay because he made three donations to Democratic candidates during the lead-up to the mid-terms. The reaction to the move has been swift and, shall we say, pointed; it seems that the only thing both the left and right can agree on right now is that Olbermann should be able to give money to whomever he wants and not have to worry about losing his job over it.
I don't really have much to add to this that hasn't been said far more articulately by just about everyone besides, maybe, Howie Kurtz (who predictably took the bullshit professorial, "well, he violated the first rule of being an objective journalist" route). The fact is that I'm willing to actually consider all kinds of conspiratorial notions on this one because I just can't make heads-or-tails of it as a rational decision. Maybe Bernie Sanders is right and NBC's corporate overlords pressured management to crack down on Olbermann because they don't like his message, as ludicrous as that seems because while Olbermann may be liberal and spend much of his time on-air railing against corporate interests, he ironically makes a shit-ton of money for the ones who run NBC; maybe MSNBC president Phil Griffin just got fed up with his unruly talent megalomanically running roughshod over him and decided to sit on that zoo fraternity of his and show it who's boss. Honestly, who knows?
The bottom line here, though, is that this highlights the disadvantage that MSNBC has always been at when it comes to allowing its hosts to express a political viewpoint, whether on-air or behind the scenes: MS is the only cable entity that has to answer to the traditional -- and laughably antiquated -- standards and practices of a network news mothership. Fox News was created as a right-wing mouthpiece; CNN basically made its own rules; only MSNBC had a set of intractable standards plastered into the walls of the place from the very beginning. NBC's dilemma has always been how to draw the line between the outspoken free-for-all on MS and the supposedly dignified proceedings at NBC News proper. Maybe this will be the event that finally forces the NBC suits to fess up and admit what everybody already knows: MSNBC's prime time isn't a news block; it's opinion. And there's nothing really wrong with that. Olbermann doesn't just wear his political leanings on his sleeve -- he occasionally shouts them in your face. The demands at NBC for notions like objectivity and fairness simply don't apply to Keith Olbermann, and it's ridiculous to pretend that they do.
At some point, these traditional media outlets will finally wise the hell up and realize that we're well past the point where it was unforgivable to express an opinion; where every journalist was supposed to robotically, dispassionately relay information; where it had to be "just the facts, ma'am." Fox News obviously realized this a long time ago; the place is almost literally a 24/7 factory for generating money for the Republican party and its candidates. MSNBC, if it has any brains at all and doesn't simply feel like trying to stare down its main marquee player just to prove that its penis is bigger, will put Olbermann back on the air as soon as it can -- and admit that it made a mistake by taking him off in the first place.
Because if you know anything at all about Keith, his occasionally tyrannical ego and penchant for behaving irrationally could easily lead to MS not having a star to put back on.
By the way, to her credit, Rachel Maddow presents, as usual, a very measured and thoughtful argument for how and why MSNBC's standards separate it from the political machine that is Fox News:
"I am a loon. I'm on the Canadian dollar bill. It's awful...but you, however, are also a race-baiting fuck."
-- Rachel Maddow, responding to Bill O'Reilly's comment that she's a loon, in the excellent cover story in this week's New York magazine.
If you ever thought that the cable news business had devolved into the playground of a bunch of narcissistic children, consider yourself proven correct.
"He just gave them the best political gift they never deserved."
-- Rachel Maddow on President Obama's not simply conciliatory but almost congratulatory tone toward the previous administration on the subject of the war in Iraq during last night's address to the nation
Well, it's official: They got away with it.
I'm generally reluctant to hammer Obama too hard because he's already getting it from all sides these days, but as of last night the entirely pointless folly in Iraq that killed thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to the rise of an unopposed Iran, fomented hatred of the U.S abroad, and helped to sink our economy to the tune of billions of wasted taxpayer dollars has been relegated to nothing more than a controversial decision that the patriots in the White House were perfectly entitled to make -- rather than the crime of the century, which is what it really was.
That's the beauty of the Bush era: It fucked things up so monumentally that we have no choice but to concentrate on fixing the damage rather than tying ourselves up going after the assholes who handed it to us on a silver, shit-piled platter.
Rachel Maddow mentioned this last night on her show, and it's a really great point to make and hammer home: Fox News bears much more of the blame in the Shirley Sherrod debacle than Andrew Breitbart does. Breitbart's a showman, a professional provocateur; it's expected that he'll chomp on a potentially incendiary item like a bass, without taking the time to consider things like context, ramifications, etc. He's in the business of throwing raw meat to the dogs and has made it clear that he's not willing to play by the rules (which can be translated into: he's not willing to be the least bit responsible and fuck you if you ask him to).
But Fox? Despite what we all know about Fox News, it still bills itself as a reputable news organization, one with an enormous microphone and a hell of a large cable audience. It not only tips its hand to the fact that it accepts that it's expected to be a respectable outlet by constantly hyping how "fair and balanced" it supposedly is -- it also pushes its willingness to break and perpetuate stories other networks haven't as proof of its responsibility to the public. After it aired what from the onset appeared to be a conspicuously misleading clip of Sherrod spouting racist rhetoric, it took Bill O'Reilly less than eight hours to declare openly that the "scoop" was proof of Fox's television news dominance. But it wasn't. Fox now has egg on its face -- egg that it wouldn't be scraping off today if it had behaved the way any responsible news outlet is expected to behave. If it hadn't put the rabid drive to claim a partisan scalp and score political points above being fucking journalists.
As Maddow said, this is why the White House was right when it argued months ago that Fox News shouldn't be treated like a normal news organization. Because it's obviously anything but.
In terms of real world impact, this won't make a dent in the Adamantium biases of the Fox News crowd -- the people who think James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles should have elementary schools named after them.
But if antiquated notions like the truth matter to you, those two -- as well as Fox and the right's answer to P.T. Barnum, Andrew Breitbart -- are sucking down a giant load of fail this morning.
"We are adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."
-- Don McLeroy, leader of the ultra-conservative faction on the Texas Board of Education, which last Friday approved a social studies curriculum for the nation's textbooks that's significantly skewed toward right-wing Christian principles
Wonder if this idiot realizes he's essentially agreeing with Stephen Colbert that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Right on cue, here's Maddow with the excellent takedown:
Jesus, I'm glad I agree with Maddow on this -- because she's just bulletproof here.
(By the way, what I actually don't agree with -- and I've said this before -- is the dumb-ass wordplay in the title bar of this video. "Repug?" What are you, 12?)
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but within the past 24 hours there have been at least two spectacular takedowns of the seemingly shameless hypocrisy of the current Republican power structure and its fervent supporters.
First, Rachel Maddow laid out, piece by inarguable piece, proof of how GOP lawmakers are attempting to block even good policy -- policy they've at times offered vocal support for and which they've gleefully reaped the benefits of -- simply because the White House backs it. In other words, and once again stop me if you've heard this before, the only reason they're uniformly turning against legislation that they've agreed would benefit the country is because their political adversaries agree that it would benefit the country.
Then in Salon, Glenn Greenwald, as much as he irritates the hell out of me sometimes, slam dunks National Review editor and Sarah Palin masturbation fantasist Rich Lowry. Little Richie took aim at Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas's new book -- titled, in obligatory over-the-top fashion, American Taliban. The book compares aspects of the American right to radical Islamists, leading Lowry to decry, "Only an extremist says, the other side in the American political discussion shares the same agenda as radical jihadidsts."
Greenwald points out that the National Review's own Jonah Goldberg recently wrote a book called Liberal Fascism -- which asserted, absurdly, that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis could be classified as liberals -- and that Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru wrote one called The Party of Death which claimed the Democrats were for euthanasia and infanticide.
Greenwald writes:
"I know it's not news that Rich Lowry is an intellectually dishonest hack. And I also know it's not news that the brain of right-wing authoritarians allows its host to blithely accuse others of exactly that which they do. Still, as common as it is, there are times when I'm amazed at how compartmentalized and self-blinding the human brain can be.
Shouldn't a normally functioning brain send a signal to Lowry along the lines of: You can't complain that it makes someone an 'extremist' to compare 'the other side in the American political discussion' to Islamic radicals because one of your magazine's Senior Editors just recently wrote a book comparing liberals to Nazis, and another one of them wrote a book calling them the Party of Death? Forget intellectual honesty; just as a strategic matter, in order not to expose yourself as a wildly dishonest and hypocritical polemicist, shouldn't the brain intervene and at least tell the person that they should alter their criticisms so it's not blatantly attacking exactly what their closest comrades do? Yet somehow, the brain never sends that signal -- or it never gets received -- and people like Rich Lowry can sit there with a straight face and attack someone for doing exactly that which his own writers do, without any apparent recognition of that fact at all. If nothing else, it's a wonder to behold as a biological and psychological phenomenon."
Once again, though, as I've been saying 'til I'm blue in the face lately, I'm just not sure logic even has an impact anymore. Ideologues at the extreme of either side of the political argument appear to be bulletproof to it; the only difference being that the Republicans seem to be at the mercy of those extremist ideologues these days. They've allowed their party to be hijacked by them and they've gladly fallen in lockstep behind.
The folly of this is what led me to write the following piece in November of last year. Maybe this is where I first began to sort of "give up."
If you've read this site long enough, you probably know that it hasn't always been this way.
I used to put a very high value on my ability to evaluate each issue on its own merits. Although I often tend to be center-left in my politics -- rarely if ever going the extreme liberal route -- I spent many years frequently siding with the right on a whole host of topics. I'm all for being strong on defense; I could care less about the political correctness that was a ridiculous liberal cause celebre for quite some time; I don't believe capitalism to be inherently evil; I want to see the poor and helpless in this country treated with dignity and everyone afforded good health care, but I think it requires a more efficient and vigilant government -- not a big one willing to just throw money around; I think that paying extra attention to certain ethnicities at airports is a natural concession to reality in this day and age and amounts to basic police work; I hate hippies; I can occasionally be as jingoistic as your average Toby Keith fan and freely admit that right after 9/11, I too had the knee-jerk reaction that wanted to see us annihilate a random city in the Middle East, just as an object lesson; I pretty much laughed out loud when those Navy snipers took out the Somali pirates who held an American captain hostage back in April.
Yes, sometimes I'm the first one to get all "America, fuck yeah."
For months and months on this site, I skewered Democrats in much the same way I skewered Republicans, believing that working backward in any argument to make the "facts" fit a predetermined point-of-view -- no matter that point-of-view -- was the most intellectually dishonest thing imaginable. I still think that I'm capable of sticking to that ideal, because if I don't, then my already somewhat inconsequential opinions are rendered utterly worthless since they're the product of nothing more than partisan prejudices.
But lately it's no secret that I have actually been more outraged by the actions of the right as a whole than those of the left. And I think the reason for that can be summed up in one simple question that may seem trite but which kind of needs to be asked: When did the primary voices of the American right become so shockingly dumb -- so shamelessly willing to jettison every last vestige of rational thought? True, during the Bush years stupid seemed to reign -- but the reality was always that those at the top were very smart people using very gullible people as stage props to further their agenda. I also get that this still happens regularly -- on both ends of the political spectrum.
But something has changed recently; maybe it started with the introduction of Sarah Palin to an already toxic mixture of paranoia and ignorance coming to a boil within certain segments of the population. Either way, over the last year it seems as if all logic and reason within the Republican party and its champions on talk radio and Fox News has gone completely out the window. It's like these people have lost their fucking minds. I'm not simply talking about their tendency to embrace and perpetuate half-baked conspiracy theories of the most mind-bogglingly outlandish variety; I mean their lack of shame at making arguments that not only don't hold up within the context of an extended timeline -- the kind of bewildering shit that can easily be proven hypocritical by comparing it to their comments of just one year ago -- but make no sense at face value.
Last night on Fox News, Sean "I Can Put You Into a Car Regardless of Your Credit History" Hannity made a comment and an implication so inflammatory and absurd that it's shocking his brain didn't rip the top of his head open to get some air. He pondered, "What does (it) say about Barack Obama and our government," that apparently the U.S. military knew that Major Nidal Nasan had contacted al Qaeda and was a growing threat yet did nothing to stop him? In other words, Hannity tried to link the fact that the military may have dropped the ball in devastating fashion on the Fort Hood shooting to the fact that Barack Obama is in the White House.
Do I need to remind you -- since reminding an obviously thick-headed ideologue like Hannity wouldn't do a damn bit of good -- that in the months leading up to 9/11, there were intelligence failures left and right within the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration, including one in which Bush himself seemed to flat-out ignore the warnings of an intelligence report that all but spelled out the coming attack? I'm not saying that governmental agencies shouldn't be held responsible for their failures when a national tragedy happens that could have been prevented by them; I'm saying that you can't keep a straight face and castigate one president of the United States for an avoidable catastrophe that happened on his watch after singing the praises of another who was much closer to the fuck-ups that led to the avoidable catastrophe that happened on his. Well, you can't keep a straight face unless you're either a modern right-wing pundit or the lead character from Memento.
This is just another example of the kind of bald-faced, completely-detached-from-reality hypocrisy that the people who've hijacked the Republican party have trafficked in now for months into years -- the same people who spent almost eight years ranting and raving about how criticizing the president during a time of war amounted to treason, but who now conveniently add the caveat "Unless that President is Barack Obama -- That's Alright."
Crackpot conspiracy theories, circular reasoning, selective memory, insane arguments that go nowhere, the complete abandonment of logic and reason, the canonization of the craziest and most farcical among its lunatic fringe -- this is why it's become impossible to defend the GOP these days. It's gotten so bad that even taking an occasional stand for the ideals of conservatism, some of which I happen to agree with, makes me feel like I need a shower -- because those who are supposed to be advancing these ideals have instead allowed their party to meltdown from the inside out.
It's almost impossible to imagine that conservatism was once the domain of unapologetic intellectuals like William F. Buckley.
Now look at it -- it's the soapbox from which Michele Bachmann shouts gibberish.
Who with a brain wants to in any way be associated with that?
