Another Wingnut Obsession a Lie
(March 24, 2007 -- 10:27 AM EDT // link // )

Here's a little light weekend entertainment for you: Our first installment of "Another Wingnut Obsession a Lie," or AWOL -- as in awol from reality, decency, sanity.

Today's edition of AWOL stars Michelle Malkin and winger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. For days now, Malkin and Johnson -- with an assist from Drudge and other righties -- have been pretending to be outraged by the fact that protesters burned a U.S. soldier in effigy and did other loathsome things during an antiwar protest in Portland. They are both desperately trying to turn this into something representative of antiwar sentiment as a whole, but in a laughably dishonest way.

The reason this is worth our time is that it's part of a much larger winger campaign of desperation to seize on isolated nutty and despicable acts to shore up the rapidly collapsing GOP argument that the Antiwar Majority's opposition to the war is anti-troops. This campaign relies on everything from lies like today's edition of AWOL to evoking cultural memories of allegedly spat-upon Vietnam veterans. Gotta knock it down every time it pops up.

So here's today's version. Johnson and Malkin are both making very loud noises of outrage about this editorial in the Portland Tribune. They are pointing to parts of the editorial highlighting various disgusting and loony acts by a few of the protesters, which led to a standoff with police and arrests. Johnson claims somberly that this represents "a new low for the antiwar movement," while Malkin sagely opines: "A few fringe actors? Not."

But wait -- guess who doesn't think this nutty behavior represents the "antiwar movement," and does think it was the work of a "few fringe actors"? The police who battled the protesters, that's who! Elsewhere in the very same paper Johnson and Malkin quote from to make their bogus argument, there's also this:

According to police spokeswoman Officer Cathe Kent, the confrontation began when a splinter group at the end of the march tried to pull a bicycle patrol officer into their group...

"This was a splinter group. It was not the group we negotiated with for weeks before the march. Those people had a peaceful march and went home," said Kent.

Even better, here's an excerpt from the very same editorial cited by both Malkin and Johnson that for some reason wasn't quoted by them:

The vast majority of the estimated 15,000 protesters who took part in a peace march Sunday in downtown Portland did just that. They were well-behaved, well-intentioned and serious about their cause...Most of the people who marched on Sunday fully understand [that violence harms their cause]. And by singling out the few who didn’t, we don’t intend to place thousands of demonstrators under one label.

Best part of all: Of the estimated 15,000 who marched, only 14 were arrested for various low-level charges. That's less than .1 percent, students.

As Atrios would say, Swatting flies.

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Dem Congressman Rips Washington Post For Helping Land Us In "Stupid, Ill-Advised War"
(March 23, 2007 -- 11:58 AM EDT // link // )

Oh, man -- this is really a great one. This morning The Washington Post published the latest in a string of dishonest, misleading editorials about the House Dems' Iraq bill.

Today on the floor of the House of Representatives during debate over the bill, Dem Rep. David Obey (Obey!) tore into the Post devastatingly hard. He made the rather compelling case that we shouldn't be listening to the Post's edit page about the bill now given how disastrously wrong their war cheerleading has turned out to be.

Obey hammered the paper for everything from spewing Republican talking points to being partly responsible for getting us stuck in Iraq. When he was done, all that was left was a pile of shredded Hiatt.

View it here:

Here's a partial transcript:

Let me submit to you the problem we have today is not that we didn't listen enough to people like The Washington Post. It's that we listened too much. They endorsed going to war in the first place. They helped drive the drumbeat that drove almost two-thirds of the people in this chamber to vote for that misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised war that has destroyed our influence over a third of the world. So I make no apology if the moral sensibilities of some people on this floor, or the editorial writers of The Washington Post, are offended because they don't like the specific language contained in our benchmarks or in our timelines.

What matters in the end is not what the specific language is. What matters is whether or not we produce a product today that puts pressure on this Administration and sends a message to Iraq, to the Iraqi politicians that we're going to end the permanent long-term dead end babysitting service. That's what we're trying to do. And if The Washington Post is offended about the way we do it, that's just too bad.

That must have felt pretty good. It's about time someone did this.

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Joe Klein Versus Eric Alterman.
(March 22, 2007 -- 2:47 PM EDT // link // )

Joe Klein takes Eric Alterman to task because he dug up a Klein quote from The New Yorker in 2000 and posted it on his Altercation blog:

Quote of the Day: "Given the circumstances, there is only one possible governing strategy [for George W. Bush]: a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship." -- Joe Klein, The New Yorker.

Klein says that this demonstrates that Alterman is "still after me" and "still pathetic," then rejoins:

But I was right about that, wasn't I? Bush's idiotic right-wing governing strategy has turned out to be a historic failure, no?

Well yes, but that isn't the only point that Klein argued in the New Yorker in 2000. I've got a fuller excerpt from Klein's original piece after the jump (if you're interested), and while Klein did warn against a hyper-partisan governing style, he also was wrong in some key ways, too -- the very point Alterman was highlighting.

But here's the thing. The point isn't even so much whether Klein was right or wrong six years ago. I'm raising this in all sincerity to ask a larger question: Why is this "pathetic"? Why does Klein tend to react so violently when people quote his past work? I mean, if you're a pundit, you should want people to think your opinions are important enough to engage. Alterman -- like many liberal bloggers -- thinks centrist pundits like Klein are so influential that their past wrongness is partly responsible for our current state of affairs, that they successfully marginalized early liberal anti-Bush voices as extreme while simultaneously blinding themselves to the genuine extremism of the party running the entire Federal government, thus helping land us in the current mess.

You can agree or disagree with this view, but either way, the point is that many liberals clearly think Klein is influential enough to be argued with -- often -- and hence quote his past work in doing so. Why does this seem to get Klein so ticked off so often? After all, the very premise of the pundit enterprise is that you get paid big money to tell people what to think because thanks to your superior interpretive powers, your opinions matter. You can't expect people to take your opinions seriously while simultaneously being a bad sport when people hold your words to account. On the other hand, if you think your opinions shouldn't be weighed against history, why be a pundit in the first place?

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Continue reading "Joe Klein Versus Eric Alterman."

Tom Friedman Sets New Deadline For Withdrawal If "Surge" Fails: Late Summer
(March 21, 2007 -- 12:22 PM EDT // link // )

Apologies for hitting on this again, but this is key. I think we've gotten as close as we're gonna get to an endorsement of an actual policy on Iraq from Tom Friedman. Such an endorsement shouldn't be that hard to come by from a man who enjoys the distinction of being one of the principal interpreters of the Middle East for American audiences, but so be it.

In today's column, Friedman makes a bunch of fair points about how the new Dem Congressional leadership's pressure on Bush is acting as leverage over the Iraqi government. But he also appears to set a deadline for the "surge" to work, writing:

As for General Petraeus, I have no idea whether his military strategy is right, but at least he has one — and he has stated that by “late summer” we should know if it’s working. As General Petraeus told the BBC last week, “I have an obligation to the young men and women in uniform out here, that if I think it’s not going to happen, to tell them that it’s not going to happen, and there needs to be a change.”

We need to root for General Petraeus to succeed, and hold him to those words if he doesn’t — not only for the sake of the soldiers on the ground, but also so that Mr. Bush is not allowed to drag the war out until the end of his term, and then leave it for his successor to unwind.

Look, in all seriousness, what the hell do I know -- I don't know a scintilla about the Middle East compared to what Friedman does, obviously. He's our lantern in a very dark cave, he's the sherpa, he's our guide to a very strange land. That's why I really want to hear, in clear and simple English, what he thinks we should do about the situation we find ourselves in.

So what's he saying here? If the "surge isn't working by "late summer," we need to hold Petraeus to his promise of a "change," Friedman says. But what kind of change? Friedman doesn't say so directly, but if this change would prevent Bush from dragging out the war "until the end of his term," that can mean only one thing: Withdrawal. Right? Of course, Friedman also says it's gonna be tough to judge whether escalation is "working" -- giving himself yet more wiggle room -- but in fairness, he also adds that the question of whether it's working is a judgment "we may soon have to make."

Back in November, Friedman laid out what he saw as our choices very clearly: He said we either had to add 150,000 new troops or initiate a "phased withdrawal over 10 months." After Bush subsequently announced he was sending to Iraq approximately one-seventh that amount of troops, Friedman did a lot of equivocating and mumbling about possibly supporting escalation if this and if that. But now Friedman's back with a deadline again -- if escalation fails by "late summer," it'll be time to pull out, he seems to be saying. That's roughly one Friedman Unit, or six months.

Friedman says we need to hold Petraeus to his words. The question now, however, is this: Will Friedman ever hold himself to his own words?

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Matt Drudge Posts 1984-Style Anti-Hillary Video; Networks Jump
(March 20, 2007 -- 5:19 PM EDT // link // )

You don't need convincing, I'm sure, but here's still more evidence (channeling Mark Halperin) that the slogan of the big networks should be:

Matt Drudge Rules Our World, Because We Happily Let Him Do Just That

Yesterday, most of the major networks lavished coverage on the "controversial" 1984-style video that slams Hilllary Clinton by taking footage of her speaking and putting it in a 1984-ish context. Via Nexis, ABC News, CNN, and NBC Nightly News all covered it, even though it's, well, really not all that newsworthy.

Why now? As Ben Smith notes, this video has been making the rounds for at least two solid weeks. It was being written about as early as March 6. What changed?

Here's what changed: The networks' assignment editor, Matt Drudge, told them that it was important. I went back and checked, and yep -- Drudge posted it late Sunday evening. Within 24 hours, CNN, NBC and ABC had all responded to Drudge's call for coverage. Funnily enough, I can't find a single example on Nexis of any of those same networks saying anything about this before Drudge told them to. Had reporters and producers at these networks not heard of it before late Sunday evening? Almost certainly not.

Ultimately, what's really amusing about this is that the networks' mindless willingness to take their cues from Drudge is far more Ridley Scott and George Orwell than anything this video tries to say about Hillary.

Update: Media Matters notes that a San Francisco newspaper wrote about this on March 17 -- so, no, there's virtually no doubt that reporters and editors at the major networks knew about this but didn't think it was important until Drudge told them it was.

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Richard Cohen: When It Comes To The Troops' "Wasted" Lives, Only Dems Are Political
(March 20, 2007 -- 9:13 AM EDT // link // )

Let's walk through this very slowly. Some time ago, both John McCain and Barack Obama referred to lost lives in Iraq as "wasted." When Obama did this, Republicans attacked him. Then, when McCain did it, Democrats attacked him. Nothing complicated there, right?

In Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's retelling of these episodes, however, only the Democrats tried to politicize this. From his column today:

McCain used the "W" word when he announced on the David Letterman show that he would run for president. "Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," he said. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives." Precisely so.

The Democratic National Committee, ever poised for the cheap shot, accused McCain of "insulting our brave troops" and demanded an apology. Others joined in, and McCain obliged, saying he should have used the word "sacrificed." Among the sacrifices being made, of course, is McCain's integrity.

Earlier, Obama had also been caught uttering the truth. Soon after he announced for the presidency, the senator concluded a criticism of the war with the "W" word -- "over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." Obama quickly apologized, confessing to a "slip of the tongue." He then reformulated his statement using the word "sacrifices." For some reason, the Democratic National Committee held its tongue.

In other words, those Dems were low enough to exploit the troops with this partisan, political "cheap shot." But the GOP committed the very same "cheap shot," even though Cohen didn't tell you this. From Fox News, on February 12, 2007 (via Nexis):

STEVE BROWN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Use of the words wasted about America's Iraq war dead prompted a campaign strategist from the Republican National Committee to say, quote, "the families of these fallen heroes should be outraged and deserve better than to have someone describe the lives of their lost loved ones as wasted."

That's not all. Obama's "wasted" comment is featured in a Republican National Committee memo about Obama as proof that he is "an inexperienced, insulated, arrogant, unabashed liberal." As shots go, that's pretty cheap, too.

Yep, so very clearly, Cohen deep-sixed this info. He committed a ritual Snuffing of an Unmanageable Fact, an act we'll henceforth describe with the acronym SNUF -- as in, Cohen pulled a SNUF.

What makes Cohen's omission all the more puzzling is that the rest of the column is pretty unobjectionable, even decent. It's devoted to a discussion mostly of the various things Republicans are doing to use the troops as political props -- things which, unlike the skirmish over the word "wasted," have actual consequences for them, such as, you know, leaving them in a war. It's almost as if Cohen felt the need to toss in his whopping distortion of the "wasted" battle in order to achieve "balance" -- as in, don't worry, Democrats are bad, too! If so, Cohen's quest for "balance" led him to do to a pretty glaring disservice to the truth.

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Entire Field Of Credible Dem Candidates Has Gotten Fewer Divorces Than Rudy Alone
(March 19, 2007 -- 4:21 PM EDT // link // )

Here's Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine about the Republican Presidential candidates' predilection for getting divorces:

Then again, the Republicans are fielding a motley crew right now: if you count Newt Gingrich, who'll probably join the fray in the fall, the four leading candidates have had nine marriages among them: Giuliani three, Gingrich three, McCain two and Romney one. The Republican faithful are left with a devil of a choice: moderate candidates who live like liberals, or religious conservatives who talk like liberals.

So Klein thinks getting a divorce is living like a "liberal"?

Okay, he obviously intends "live like liberals" to mean that this is how the "Republican faithful," not he himself, see this behavior. So, not really objectionable. But, hey, I had to get your attention somehow, and besides, this suggests a useful question:

How many divorces have their been among the men -- and women -- in the Democratic field? Let's run through them real quick, just for the fun of it. None of the following liberal Dem candidates has gotten divorced:

(1) Hillary: You know the story. No need to repeat it

(2) Obama: Married to Michelle, whom he met when she was just out of law school, for 15 years.

(3) Edwards: Married to Elizabeth since 1977; they've had four children, one of whom was killed in a car crash. As Andrew Sullivan recently observed: "Most couples never survive the death of a child. The Edwards family did — and went on to have two more."

(4) Richardson: Married to his high-school sweetheart for 33 years.

(5) Biden: First wife killed in car accident in 1972; married to his current wife for almost 30 years.

Yeah, you have to really scrape your way to the bottom of the Democratic field to find divorces. The only Dem Presidential candidate with any kind of credible shot who has gotten divorced is...Chris Dodd, who divorced in 1982.

In fact, if you think about it, the entire field of Dems deemed credible boasts fewer divorces than Rudy Giuliani alone!

Yes, there's also Dennis Kucinich, who also has divorced twice. Nonetheless, the basic points here stand: The top four GOP candidates have divorced a total of five times, while the top four liberal candidates have a total of zero divorces among them. And the whole field of Dems seen to have a credible shot at winning has gotten fewer total divorces than the current GOP frontrunner. Not exactly heavy lifting, admittedly, but it certainly seems worth noting and keeping in mind.

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