Memo To Washington Post's Murray: Democrats And Independent Experts Have Opinions, Too
(September 22, 2007 -- 2:31 PM EDT // link // )

You know, it's boring that this needs to be pointed out, but Republicans aren't the only people out there with opinions on things.

In today's Washington Post piece on the failure of Levin-Reed in the Senate, Shailagh Murray reports that brash and confident Republicans know for a fact that public opinion is now shifting on Iraq:

As the Democrats struggled, Republicans sounded emboldened. The public has grown more patient on Iraq, they argued, after a report last week from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, showing security improvements, and after Bush's announcement that he would begin to slowly withdraw troops.

It's lovely to hear that Republicans think Petraeus has moved public opinion in their direction. But what do people who aren't Republican think about the public's "patience" about Iraq? Well, as you all know, multiple independent pollsters have found the opposite: That public opinion isn't shifting at all on the question of how quickly to pull out of Iraq. None of the findings of these poor neglected pollsters is represented here; not even any Democrat is allowed to rebut this.

Come on, now. This isn't difficult. Two parties are having a dispute about something. One party thinks one thing. The other thinks the opposite thing. If you're not going to bother to determine which side is right, at least take the elementary step of quoting both their arguments.

The piece descends deeper into absurdity:

GOP Senate offices circulated the results of a Gallup poll released this week that showed 54 percent of those surveyed think Petraeus's plan for removing troops is the right pace, or even too quick. One-third of those surveyed viewed the withdrawal as moving too slowly.

As it happens, the very same poll that Murray allows these GOPers to cherry pick from has a bunch of other numbers in it, too. It finds that 59% want a timetable for withdrawal and that barely one-third think the surge is having a positive effect. Indeed, the pollsters themselves conclude that most of the public's opinions on Iraq "run contrary to the message delivered by Petraeus to Congress last week."

The only numbers from this poll that make it into Murray's piece, however, are the ones that GOP Senate staffers circulated. Look, instead of this, why not err on the side of informing the readers? They won't mind. In fact, they'll appreciate it.

Charge: Desperate To Curry Favor With Bush, CBS Execs Tried Not To Run Abu Ghraib Story
(September 21, 2007 -- 5:01 PM EDT // link // )

I've been going through the big lawsuit that Dan Rather filed against CBS the other day, and there's some stuff in it that's pretty eye-opening and definitely deserving of more attention.

Rather's lawsuit, of course, deals mostly with the scandal around the story about Bush and the Air National Guard. But as TPM Reader KC alerted us, there are some peripheral allegations in the suit that are at least as interesting, and these concern another story CBS broke: The Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Specifically, buried in the lawsuit is the allegation that top CBS execs, under intense pressure from government officials, refused for weeks to air the torture story, despite mounting evidence that the story was solid. The execs fingered are CBS News president Andrew Heyward and senior vice president Betsy West.

This episode has been referenced in passing here and there in news accounts, and some of the details about CBS' foot dragging on Abu Ghraib have been known for years. But here you have Rather himself making these allegations from the inside, on the record. And the lawsuit spells out the whole episode in ugly detail.

Here's what happened, according to an excerpt buried on page 11 of the complaint:

38. In late April 2004, Mr. Rather, as Correspondent, and Mary Mapes, a veteran producer, broke a news story of national urgency on 60 Minutes II — the abuse by American military personnel of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. The story, which included photographs of the abusive treatment of prisoners, consumed American news media for many months.

39. Despite the story's importance, and because of the obvious negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it. As a general rule, senior executives of CBS News do not take a hands-on role in the editing and vetting of a story. However, CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Senior Vice President Betsy West were involved intimately in the editing and vetting process of the Abu Ghraib story. However, for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story, continuously insisting that it lacked sufficient substantiation. As Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes provided each requested verification, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to "raise the goalposts," insisting on additional substantiation.

40. Even after obtaining nearly a dozen, now notorious, photographs, which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks. This delay was, in part, occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials urging CBS to drop the story or at least delay it. As a part of that pressure, Mr. Rather received a personal telephone call from General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urging him to delay the story.

41. Only after it became apparent that, due to the delay, sources were talking to other news organizations and that CBS would be "scooped," Mr. Heyward and Ms. West approved the airing of the story for April 28, 2004. Even then, CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News.

Your liberal media.

The lawsuit adds elsewhere that Viacom chief Sumner Redstone "considered it to be in his corporate interest to curry favor with the Bush administration."

Again, some stuff about CBS' foot-dragging has been known for years, but the details here are really key. If true, it's pretty surprising that CBS, in apparent response to government pressure, allegedly tried to downplay its own scoop by airing it only once and not precede it with on-air promotion.

Perhaps many of these details are known to some people. But they're certainly deserving of wider dissemination, and suggest that there's much more to the story. What emerges here is a striking portrait of a big news org that, fearful of pressure from conservative critics and eager to curry favor with the Bush administration, allegedly dragged its feet to an extraordinary degree in order to avoid revealing the truths it knew about a horrifying scandal of international dimensions.

Sobering stuff.

New York Times Falsely Reports That Dems' Resolution Condemning Attacks On Military Didn't Mention MoveOn Ad
(September 21, 2007 -- 10:39 AM EDT // link // )

Yesterday Senator Barbara Boxer introduced a resolution condemning all political attacks on members of the military. It was submitted alongside the GOP resolution condemning MoveOn's attack on Mighty Scholar Warrior Petraeus -- Boxer's idea being that her companion measure would reveal the GOP's hypocrisy by showcasing their unwillingness to condemn political attacks on veterans like Max Cleland and John Kerry.

In its piece today on the Senate votes, The New York Times wrote that Boxer's resolution condemned all such attacks, but not MoveOn's Petraeus attack. The piece said:

Ms. Boxer’s proposal, which failed, called for the Senate to “strongly condemn all attacks on the honor, integrity and patriotism” of anyone in the United States armed forces. It did not mention the MoveOn.org ad.

So those hypocritical Dems wouldn't even condemn MoveOn's attack on Petraeus in a measure that purported to be condeming all attacks on members of U.S. military, right? This of course was the GOP's narrative of the week -- you know, Dems cowering in fear of the anti-military left. And this description implies equivalent hypocrisy -- that each party was equally selective in picking whom they were prepared to condemn.

The only problem with The Times's description of this, however, is that it's entirely false. Boxer's resolution did indeed condemn MoveOn's anti-Petraeus ad -- quite prominently, in fact.

You can find Boxer's resolution here, on the U.S. Senate's official Web site. Here's the relevant paragraph:

(6) On September 10, 2007, an advertisement in the New York Times was an unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus; who is honorably leading our Armed Forces in Iraq and carrying out the mission assigned to him by the President of the United States; and

(7) Such personal attacks on those with distinguished military service to our nation have become all too frequent.

I'd say that paragraph counts as condemning the MoveOn ad, wouldn't you? Was there another ad in The Times that day hitting Petraeus that we all missed?

Unlike The Times, The Washington Post got this right today, reporting that while Boxer's resolution didn't use the word "MoveOn," it "criticized the MoveOn ad but also denounced Republicans for attacking the military record of Kerry in 2004 through the Swift boat ads."

By contrast, The Times either overlooked that paragraph in the reso entirely or used the fact that the reso didn't explicitly use the word "MoveOn" as the highly questionable basis for asserting that the reso "did not mention" the ad at all. Either way, the result was an outright falsehood that deserves a correction.

What happened here? Perhaps it was just plain old sloppy journalism. Or perhaps just typical media brainlock -- as in, Dems would never condemn MoveOn, so there's no way this resolution did so, either. Which is it? We report, you decide.

Associated Press' Ron Fournier: John Edwards Seems Genuine To Me, But He Might Be A Phony, Anyway
(September 20, 2007 -- 6:50 PM EDT // link // )

Oh, man -- we've got a live one here. This piece by the Associated Press' Ron Fournier is one of the most desperate efforts to breathe life into the "John Edwards is a phony" narrative that I've seen yet.

Here's the headline:

It says a great deal about our discourse that the question, "Is Edwards real or a phony?" is described without irony as "analysis," but let's put that aside for a sec.

At the top of the piece -- which tells us that there are "two John Edwardses," the real one and the phony one -- we get the obligatory mentions of the expensive haircut, the big mansion, and his moneymaking at hedge funds, even though those are all old news. The justification for mentioning them is that Edwards' unnamed rivals are trying to make an issue of them -- as if that automatically makes them something worthy of yet more coverage.

The piece goes on and on in that vein, rehashing just about every single attack we've heard on Edwards throughout the campaign. And then, in the 27th paragraph, we get hit with something truly astonishing: Fournier himself spent time with Edwards, and he came away convinced that he just might be genuine, after all!

Spending time with Edwards can leave the most cynical person believing that he's still fighting for those people, driven by the hard knowledge of how short life can be. His son, Wade, was killed in a car accident in 1996 ("I think of him every day.") and his wife, Elizabeth, has incurable cancer ("There have been two huge events in my life").

So, is the verdict that Edwards just may not be such a phony? Nope! Writing about this potentially genuine Edwards that he actually spent time with, Fournier concludes:

That is one John Edwards.

The question voters need to answer is whether it's the only one that matters.

But where did this other fake Edwards that voters need to ask themselves about come from, anyway? Why, he's the one Fournier and his colleagues are working so hard to create in pieces like this, of course. Truly, the media hall of mirrors is a bizarre and unsettling place.

Boehner Finally Responds To "Small Price" Criticism -- And Dissembles So Blatantly That Even Fox Calls Him On It!
(September 20, 2007 -- 1:26 PM EDT // link // )

Okay, this is a fun postcript to the whole battle over John Bohner's "small price" remark, which this blog first reported on a couple of weeks ago.

Boehner has finally responded personally on television for the first time to all the criticism of his remark, a sign that the beating he's taking for it has gotten so bad that it's time for some heavy-duty damage control. Not surprisingly, the venue he selected for his response was an interview with Fox News.

But in the interview, Boehner dissembled so ostentatiously about his initial comments that even Fox News couldn't help but call him on it. Take a look:

Boehner's key pushback:

"The question was about the money."

In response, Fox News pointed out in its report that the question was in fact about troop deaths, too -- and Fox pointed this out twice. In this regard, Fox News outdid even the august The New York Times's botched coverage of this. Never thought I'd be saying this, but good for Fox.

Meanwhile, it's kind of surprising that even Fox, of all organizations, finally recognized the news value of this story -- even as many, many, many of the big news orgs that lavished tons of coverage on John Kerry's botched troop joke continue to ignore it. Nonetheless, it's clear that the criticism of Boehner's remarks has mounted to the point where it's become a real problem -- prompting him to flee into Fox's GOP safe zone to defend himself.

False Washington Post Headline Says Dem Push On Iraq Is "On Hold"
(September 19, 2007 -- 11:51 AM EDT // link // )

As this blog has frequently noted, one of the more puzzling things you see at your big news orgs is this odd eagerness to report that Congressional Dem leaders have retreated on Iraq -- even if they haven't, and even if they are actively planning to do just the opposite.

Today, for instance, someone at The Washington Post was so eager to report the story this way that he or she wrote a false headline saying this was the case -- even though reporting elsewhere in the same edition of the paper said that just the opposite was the case. Here's the hed:

Both of those assertions are outright false. What actually happened yesterday is that Harry Reid said that Dems were dropping the idea of trying to reach a bipartisan compromise on a bill without withdrawal timelines.

This was magically transformed by WaPo's headline writers into the idea that Dems were putting all their efforts to halt the war in general on hold. And the subhed reinforced this idea, saying that such efforts were set to start happening again this coming spring.

Both false. What Reid actually said yesterday was that votes with binding measures are in fact being developed right now. The WaPo article itself said this, though it downplayed it, and so did another piece in the same paper.

And here's how the Associated Press accurately reported on what Reid is doing:

The Democratic leader said he will call for a vote this month on several anti-war proposals, including one by Sen. Carl Levin that would insist President Bush end U.S. combat next summer. The proposals would be mandatory and not leave Bush wiggle room, said Reid, D-Nev.

"This month" obviously isn't next spring, unless I've been asleep under a tree for around seven months without realizing it.

But presto -- the magic WaPo headline wand effortlessly transformed this into yet another instance of Dems caving.

Update: Taylor Marsh nailed this one first.

WaPo's Richard Cohen Devotes Whole Column To Attacking Hillary Over MoveOn
(September 18, 2007 -- 12:09 PM EDT // link // )

Glenn Greenwald and Atrios have already taken solid whacks today at the media idiocy surrounding the GOP attack on Dems for not condemning MoveOn's Petraeus ad. But the worst media offender by far has to be The Washington Post's Richard Cohen.

Incredibly, Cohen today devotes an entire column to Hillary Clinton's failure to blast MoveOn. Cohen's fury over this unwillingness to follow the GOP's command for criticism of the group is directed only at her, even though multiple other Dems also didn't see fit to follow the GOP's marching orders on this.

Sensing this weakness in his argument, Cohen comes up with several creative justifications for singling her out, the best one being...the scandals in the Clinton White House. He actually makes the argument that her failure to do the GOP's bidding over the MoveOn ad should remind us of all the questions the 1990s scandals raised about her character. Cohen writes:

Clinton is the front-runner, quite possibly the next president of the United States, so it is reasonable to focus on her and wonder if, as some allege, she does indeed have a spine. In this instance, it was nowhere to be found...

The issue with Hillary Clinton is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has -- how do we say this? -- the character to be president. Behind her, after all, trails the lingering vapor of all those gates: Travel, File, Whitewater and other scandals to which she was a party only through marriage. In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark...it is not silly to wonder -- yet again -- about what makes Hillary run.

Of course, if Hillary is "always wearing a question mark" because of those long-ago "scandals," it's because Richard Cohen and others keep bringing them up again -- even though he himself concedes that she was a party to the scandals "only through marriage." And we need to remind ourselves just how troubled we are by this past...because nearly a decade later she failed to heed the GOP's orders and condemn a single newspaper ad?

Woah. I mean, this blog has pointed all too frequently to the punditry's bizarre desire for the public -- against its own wishes -- to perceive Hillary's candidacy as a negative in light of the Clinton Presidency. But to suggest that bad memories of the Clinton scandals should be triggered by, of all things, Hillary's unwillingness to condemn the MoveOn ad is just deeply strange. It's borderline padded-cell material, really.

Cheney Falsely Attacks New York Times For Printing "Subsidized" MoveOn Ad
(September 17, 2007 -- 7:24 PM EDT // link // )

The New York Times is one of those reliable GOP stock villains -- others include MoveOn, Howard Dean, and the two leading She-Demons of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton -- that can always be targeted whenever the GOP groundlings get drunk, grow bored with the main plot, and are restless for a cheap distraction.

Cheney attacked the Times as treasonous back in 2006 when the administration was under fire over the warrantless wiretapping story. And now, with the Petraeus testimony failing to budge public opinion, Cheney is doing it again, pushing the falsehood that The Times gave an ideologically-motivated discount to MoveOn's full-page ad in the paper attacking Scholar-Warrior Petraeus.

Check out what Cheney said today:

Like most Americans, I admire the integrity and the candor that General Petraeus showed in his hearings before Congress. And the attacks on him by MoveOn.org in ad space provided at subsidized rates in The New York Times last week were an outrage. (Applause.) It's bad enough when politicians turn their backs on a war they voted for and supported when it was popular. But no one in politics, regardless of party, should hesitate to object when an American soldier at war is mocked and insulted. (Applause.)

It's kind of funny that the Vice President of the United States can lie egregiously about the top journalistic organization in the world -- and nobody bats an eye about it anymore.

But the really interesting thing here is that Cheney knows he can lie about this because he can bank on the fact that the Republican talking point on this -- that The Times gave a special cozy discount to MoveOn for days now -- has gotten far more circulation than the truth about it.

In reality, of course, there was nothing special about the rate that MoveOn got from the paper at all. As The Times itself explained last week, the paper charges less than the full price when advocacy groups request full-page black-and-white advertisements that run on a “standby” basis, meaning an advertiser can request a specific day of the week but is not guaranteed that day. MoveOn knew it could bank on the ad running early in the week -- when Petraeus was testifying -- because things are slower on those days.

Thing is, however, that reality just doesn't matter. Just compare the amount of circulation that the Republican criticism got with the amount of circulation that was afforded the "standby" pushback, that is to say, the truth.

It's not even close. Cheney knows he can count on this, which is why he knows he can just tell this lie without even giving it a second thought.

What's The Real Reason Dem Leaders May "Compromise" With Republicans On Iraq?
(September 17, 2007 -- 10:51 AM EDT // link // )

Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum both have provocative posts up suggesting that a key reason Dem Congressional leaders are talking about "compromising" with Republicans and dropping their demand for a date-certain for withdrawal is that not ending the war means the GOP will still have the Iraq albatross around their necks during next year's elections. Yglesias says:

Nobody seems to want to mention it because it's impolite, but I think this is almost certainly a factor in the congressional politics of Iraq. Not only are Democrats afraid of taking certain kinds of political risks to end the war, but they see no prospect of a political upside to ending it...given that Republicans aren't doing what everyone expected them to do and reducing their political exposure on Iraq by winding the war down, Democrats are disinclined to go out on a limb to do it for them.

This may be part of the thinking, as Matt says, and there's something seductively cynical about it. But my conversations with Dem Congressional staffers and strategists persuades me that the overriding motive here is more prosaic: Dems urgently need to reverse the (accurate) perception that they've failed to act on Iraq, and they think the only way to do this is by passing a measure with some kind of concessions from Republicans -- even if the concessions end up being largely meaningless.

Recall that last spring Dems had already ruled out two key options -- defunding the war, and sending the same bill back to the President again and again. That leaves only two current options. First, pass another spending bill including withdrawal timetables, which will be vetoed, and then follow up with more no-strings-attached short-term funding, as happened last spring. This would mean that they'd suffered another short-term failure to force action and ended up funding the war anyway.

Or, second, they can pass a bill without a date-certain but one containing some sort of symbolic concessions from Republicans, such as an unenforceable demand from Congressional Republicans that the President set some kind of tentative deadline for some kind of withdrawal. Option two gets them to the same place faster, without another short-term failure. It lets them sooner argue that they've forced at least some movement on the part of the GOP -- a political must. Meanwhile, they can pursue other measures such as the Webb troop readiness act to nibble around the edges of ending this thing.

I'm not endorsing this -- or even saying that this is what will happen -- just saying that this is what I'm told the thinking is. This compromise talk is more about the Dem leadership having failed to game this out early on and having left itself with few choices than it is about calculating that a continuing war enhances their chances in 2008.

What's more, I think it's worth noting that if the liberal blogosphere is gonna take the Dem leadership to task over Iraq, which in many ways is justified, we all need to say what specifically the Dem leadership should do to end the war, given the limited choices before it. If memory serves, Atrios and Kos have both called for sending the same bill back again and again. But there's certainly been nothing approaching consensus, or even all that much discussion, about what the Dem Congress should do now in practical legislative terms. Just saying that this would be a constructive thing to be hashing out right about now.