"It was the summer of 1985, a year after the second Reagan landslide, and there was a particular speech coming up that was important to the president and first lady. It was a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which at the time was relatively new and the only presidential library that didn’t have an endowment. The event was at Ted Kennedy’s house."
After which, Sweet Baby Conservative Jebus' very favorite scribbler copies and pastes all 12 paragraphs of a speech she wrote for Ronald Reagan...
...for a JFK Library fundraiser...
...24 years ago...
...that had as much to do with the life and accomplishments of Senator Edward Kennedy as Noonan's high school essay on Tricia Nixon's weeping Virgin Mary shoe trees.
She then concludes this truly spectacular example of ostentatiously lazy, nihil ad rem self-plagiarism with a brief, third-hand mention that:
"Nancy Reagan gave a telephone interview to Chris Matthews on "Hardball." "We were close," she said of their friendship, "and it didn't make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat."
And having read this bloodless scrap of regurgitato, I am now sure of three things:
1. After all this time, the Wall Street Journal still pays Peggy Noonan by the word.
2. If I had ever tried to fob off as Newly!Relevant! something I'd written years before on an entirely different subject, the very least my English Comp teacher would have done is shred it in front of me, one page at a time.
Of course, if you got all distracted by the Kennedy coverage and forgot to get your weekly dose of Cheney over at Fox, George Stephanopoulos obligingly invited Liz “Some people say that my daddy has video of George Stephanopoulos starring as Señor Funpants in a Tijuana donkey show which is why, despite having no credentials or credibility whatsoever, I am inexplicably on teevee virtually every week” Cheney onto his puppet show to lie about torture and stuff.
But as this Sunday slips into the history books, it is the warm, personal stories about Senator Kennedy that I will remember most.
Sen. John Kerry: The way he greeted me with “Why the long face, Junior Senator?” never got old.
Sen. John McCain: I still can’t believe his dad nailed Gloria Swanson.
Sen. Orrin Hatch: Once, my magic underwear was destroyed when we were fishing for Kraken in the North Atlantic and he loaned me Gloria Swanson’s petticoats until I could get to my emergency stash. Also he took the time to memorize all the lyrics to “Heal Our Land”.
Rep. Barney Frank: You wanna understand Massachusetts politics? An Irishman, a gay man and a Mormon conservabot named Mitt walk into a bar...
Sen. Dianne Feinstein: I still can’t believe his dad nailed Gloria Swanson.
A boy: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown University sociologist: The solicitude of the uniquely Kennedyesque plenitude that informed the attitude of Obama’s altitude (stops and checks the rhyming dictionary)…horse latitude… necessitude...rectitude. Also, if I may add, one cannot overstate the importance of the pompatus of love.
Dick Cheney: I regret never getting the chance to waterboard him.
Sen. Chris Dodd: When my parents abandoned me in the Senate cloakroom, Teddy raised me as one of his own.
Bill Shakespeare: Love is not love/ When it is mingled with regards that stand/ Aloof from the entire point.
Bob Shrum: In hindsight, I almost regret my part in selling out every one of Ted Kennedy’s values and driving his party to the brink of cringing extinction.
David Gregory: I’ll bet his family is real sad.
Liz Cheney: I regret my daddy never got the chance to waterboard him.
George Will: I once lost my hairpiece while we were fishing for narwhale off the Kennedy Family pier. Teddy loaned me one of the family’s lesser grandnephews to hide my shame until I could replace it.
Sam Donaldson: There…there once. Once was a man. A man, you understand? A man. Fr-fr-from…Nantucket… (collapses sobbing.)
Lastly, ”The Chris Matthews Show” Matthews aired a canned “Does teevee affect politics?” episode with a three-minute Kennedy tribute bolted on to the end, from which we learned that carefully scripted, unfettered lying favors Republicans:
Nixon pimping his kids and a dog named Checkers to divert attention from his political slush fund…
Lee Atwater repeating his despicable “Dukakis wants Black People to rape White Women” and “Dukakis is a pussy who will let America be destroyed”…
The Swiftboat Liars for Bush…
While occasional glimpses of unscripted truth tend to badly fuck Republicans up:
Bush’s “Heckofajob Brownie” moment as New Orleans drowned…
Joseph Welch to Joe McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"…
Sarah Palin being asked tough, gotcha questions like “What papers do you read?”
Or, as Andrea Mitchell summed it up, “Reality matters sometimes.”
But only sometimes, and less and less often these days as the Fourth Estate flees ever further away from its job as the public's honest broker, fact-checker and truth-teller.
Instead lies and truth, spin and facts, news and entertainment are now all the same.
All just one, big, helping of puke-flavored digital pudding.
All just teevee.
Also, Chris, next time you want to give the impression that your show and your little epilogue are all of a piece, make sure you wear the same tie in both segments.
Because reality matters sometimes.
Update: Andrew Sullivan notes that the Chris Wallace's Hallmark Happy Fun Laptime Snugglefest with Unca Dick Cheney was tantamount to "A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers", adding that:
...there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn't work - because it's far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country's history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.
And
When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.
Andrew, everyone knows that Chris Wallace's suite in Hell was reserved and prepaid in full years ago.
Everyone also knows that neither Chris Wallace nor Dick Cheney would be possible without the tens of millions of slavering imbeciles on the Right who hang on their every word.
Tens of millions of slavering imbeciles who simply would not exist in their present state -- a completely brainwashed, goose-steppingly coordinated Democracidal horde and cultural anvil around America's neck straight out of George Orwell's worst nightmares -- had the Right not spent billions of dollars and the last thirty years relentlessly flattering, pandering and cultivating them.
These are your bastard whelplings, Andrew; the mutants and monsters crawling out of your toxic ideological dump.
How will you ever make amends for what you have done?
American Hero and GOP Maximum Leader for Life Rush Limbaugh shuts off his Ronald Reagan Alarm clock
Clears the sleep from his head with a refreshing Chesterfield
Scrubs down his corroding privates with a handful of Borateem
Dons a crisp, clean Van Heusen shirt
And pausing only long enough to put a stamp
On his important letter to the fine people at the Reagan Library
he leaves on his important mission.
His limousine rolls down the scenic Reagan Tollway
Taking the Reagan High School turnoff
Past where some of the crew from the USS Ronald Reagan
Are taking a morning jog through Reagan Park
Dropping him at last at the airport where he takes the shuttle to Reagan National Airport
Where another liveried vehicle whisks him down the Reagan Parkway
Then across town, stopping briefly at the Reagan Federal Building to shake a few hands before getting in front a microphone to deliver the his Important Message!
"Placing [Kennedy’s] name on a health-care bill, in memoriam, or using his name as a sympathy ploy to advance a health care bill that would deny Americans the choices Sen. Kennedy had is an insult and is supreme hypocrisy,” the talk show host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday. 'The senator's passing is going to give them the opportunity to use the sympathy play to get as much done in his name as possible."
…To put his name on this current health-care bill would be to insult what he stood for,” Limbaugh said.
UPDATE: Welcome First Draft readers and thanks Athenae.
Michael Jackson died of 'acute propofol intoxication,' coroner says August 28, 2009
The Los Angeles County coroner's office officially ruled the death of Michael Jackson a homicide and said he died of "acute propofol intoxication."
According to a statement from the coroner: The "manner of death has been ruled homicide. Cause of death was established as acute propofol intoxication. Other conditions contributing to death: benzodiazepine. The drugs propofol and Lorazepam were found to be the primary drugs responsible for Mr. Jackson’s death. Other drugs detected were midazolam, diazepam, lidocaine, and ephedrine. The final coroner’s report includes a complete toxicology report will that remain on security hold at the request of the Los Angeles police department and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office" ...
According to an affidavit unsealed in Houston last week, Murray told police that Jackson spent his last hours pleading for a dose of a powerful anesthetic.
Murray said he resisted -- fearful that the pop star had developed a dangerous addiction to propofol. Instead, Murray administered the sedatives Valium, lorazepam and midazolam -- five times over six hours. But none put Jackson to sleep and he continued to demand his "milk," the word the doctor said the pop star used for propofol. ...
Jackson had specifically asked concert promoter AEG Live to hire Murray as his $150,000-a-month physician to travel with him to London, where he was scheduled to perform 50 concerts.
Can you stand up? I do believe it's working, good. That'll keep you going through the show Come on it's time to go.
If you've never been to a public meeting where Da Mare or one of his goofs are having their political pipes rodded, let me tell you right off the bat, you should go. Over the years I’ve been to several, and it really is about as purely little-“d”-democratic an exercise as any big city could hope for: In front of Da Mare and the assembled heads of his every office and department, any citizen can step up to the microphone and “Cry Harold” (from this site, which helpfully saved me the trouble of transcribing this passage from Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”):
"Time was when any Terran sovereign held public court so that the lowliest might come before him without intermediary. Traces of this persisted long after kings became scarce - an Englishman could "Cry Harold!" (although none did) and the smarter city bosses still left their doors open to any gandy dancer of bindlestiff far into the twentieth century."
It is a tradition for which Da Mare rightfully deserves credit.
Now, if you are one of the many millions of citizens who cannot get over to Falconer tonight to thank Da Mare for whatever, or ask why your stop sign hasn’t been fixed, or step up to the plate with an armload of blueprints to pitch your plan for a space elevator/casino, or just to throw a righteous municipal fit, to the best of my humble abilities I will virtualize the experience for you and tell you exactly how things would go down if you went…
You will fill out a little card and eventually your name will be called along with 7-8 other citizens.
You will each be told you have two minutes to speak.
You will stand in line behind a nice old lady who will speak for 20 minutes about her block and how things used to be...a very large, sweaty person with personal hygiene issues in a faded Che tee-shirt from 1977 completely encrusted with ancient ribbons and “Lar Daly” buttons who will shout for 18 minutes about something or other...and group of very pissed off block club advocates.
Che-tee-shirt-guy will be the 25th least unhinged person there.
Da Mare will ask the nice old lady about her neighborhood. He might ask her about her parish priest, or recall that the athletic club down the street from her house is where his father used to box.
Da Mare might possibly crack a joke which is comprehensible only to himself and then laugh and repeat what he believes to be a “punch line” – “He he. An’ da Rio delegation dint even have no buttah. Hehehe. No buttah. Hehehe.” -- for many, many minutes.
At any moment Da Mare may discover some bizarrely tangential relationship between the subject the speaker wants to talk about -- say, the Sea of Tranquility-sized potholes that are eating their neighborhood -- and the subject Da Mare wants to talk about -- say, rooftop gardens. Hizzoner will then launch into a winding, passionate ramble about it, and about all dat he has tried as your Mare to do wit regards to innovative ideas like rooftop gardens...to stop da guns...an da property taxes...dis year it is a tax abatement...in da charter schools…wit da ‘Lympics….and da recession…which is why we leased dose parking meters…an I’d do it again!…for da great city dat we all love so much.
(As you stand there and watch some poor bastard get sucked under in one of Hizzoner's sudden, syntactical riptides, say a little prayer for them and thank your maker it wasn't you.)
If the subject has anything at all to do with roads – or even if it doesn’t -- Da Mare will want to know if the speaker is talking about “one a dem WPA roads”. Da Mare is obsessed with his WPA roads.
If the problem can be fixed with a dab of asphalt or a few yards of wrought iron fencing, you’ll probably get some action, but most likely Da Mare will either sit stone-faced, defer the matter to one of this Department heads, or tell you to talk to your alderman.
If you mention one of the magic keywords – schools, construction, jobs, gangs of armed weasels who are trying to steal your space elevator/casino plans, etc. – once you take your seat again, or storm dramatically out, one of the lower-order municipal life-forms will dart out to you quick like a bunny and give you a business card.
Use the business card; Odds are good that the person who gave it to you will actually try to get you an answer to your question, even if the answer is “No, sir, I promise you there are no plans at present to build space elevator/casinos in the City.”
Da Mare will thank the nice old lady.
Che-tee-shirt-guy will demand answers. He will insist that Steps Be Taken. None of that will happen.
Che-tee-shirt-guy will call Da Mare a coward. Da Mare will say “God bless you”. Che-tee-shirt-guy will call Da Mare corrupt. Da Mare will say “God bless you”. This will go on for some time. At the end of the evening, Che-tee-shirt-guy will still be Che-tee-shirt-guy, and Da Mare will still be Da Mare, which is why Da Mare will be smirking as he “blesses” Che-tee-shirt-guy.
The waiting will last a long while, and since almost everyone in the room is either a city worker forced to be there, an advocate focused on their issue, a cop, or some bored souls from local media (the teevee people will film the first 10 minutes and then leave), no one but the most theatrical or the most sincere will be remembered tomorrow.
Eventually your turn will come, so here are a few things you should know.
One, if you are planning a media stunt and you haven’t rehearsed the hell out of it and come with your own video people, it will probably fail. You will be in a hot room with acoustics like the inside of a giant, tin toilet bowl, and while your words will probably come clearly though the speakers, unless you have them properly miked and rehearsed, the antics of your supporters will come through as one, long, “Wauuuaghahah!!!”
Two, if you are planning on a public freakout, unless you want to be added to the “known ranters” list and either be treated as comic relief or deferred until after midnight, when you are dressing for the evening and trying to decide between a shirt and tie, and the too-small shorts, the triple-wide-suspenders and the faded, two-sizes-too-small-even-back-in-1977 Che-tee-shirt festooned with “Impeach Nixon”-era chest-salad…go with the fucking shirt and tie for God’s sake.
Three, whatever your issue and whether you arrive via car, bus or shopping cart, at least once in you sorry life you should get all dressed up in whatever you please, stand tall before the people whose salaries your taxes pay for and whose decisions affect your life in a thousand ways and tell ‘em exactly what is on your mind, whether it is “Thank You” or “Fuck You” and takes two minutes or 20.
Four, I already have a lock on the space elevator/casino franchise, so don’t even think about it.
Ted Kennedy: Senator, family patriarch, dead at 77
By DAVID ESPO (AP)
WASHINGTON — In the quiet of a Capitol elevator, one of Edward M. Kennedy's fellow lawmakers asked whether he had plans for a family Thanksgiving away from the nation's capital. No, the Massachusetts senator said with a shake of his head, and mentioned something about visiting his brothers' gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery.
In his half-century in the public glare, Kennedy was, above all, heir to a legacy — as well as a hero to liberals, a foil to conservatives, a legislator with few peers ...
Watching the GOP-Health Insurance Bund shift its pattern of lies from the "Enrage the yahoos" generic ( Nazi/death panel/Obama-the-Kenyan) to the "Scare grandma" specific (Socialist Kenyan wants to destroy Socialist Medicare to advance his Socialist agenda) those of us whose capacity to form new memories has not been completely destroyed by years of keeping our head stored in Rush Limbaugh's colon could not help but recall just a few, short years ago when the GOP's great love and respect for America's senior citizens was again on full display...
During that long, brutal Spring of 2005.
George W. Cheney had just finished tampering with enough elections and terrorizing enough voters into giving him four more years to finish the job of screwing American completely into the ground when he turned his rapacious, rodent attention
to Social Security.
Or, as I believe it was explained to us at the time, taking old people's dough out of that awful, Commie money-gulag called Social Security, and turning it over to the tender and benevolent care of hedge fund managers, derivative wizards and the never-fail stock market.
First, the Usual Wingnut Suspects robotically ranted out the same 5-6 Rove-spproved talking points endlessly.
Wherein video poker slot jockey, bigot and notorious liar Bill Bennett declared, on February 3, 2005 that:
"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the guy who established Social Security, said that it would be good to have it replaced by private investment over time. Private investment would be the way to really carry this thing through."
After which notorious liar and Bush Family Suppository, Brit Hume, declared that:
In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."
Hume carved up FDR’s original words like Hannibal Lechter doing a guest shot on “Nip/Tuck” and inverted their intent in order to advance the House of Bush’s crusade to destroy the legacy of the New Deal. ...
And when that didn't work -- when America's seniors dug in their orthopedic heels and said "Hell No!" to GOP plans to turn their small, government-guaranteed hedge against starvation and penury over to the banksters -- the Right did what the Right does when the screaming and the lies fail: they paid the Swiftboat thugs to slither as deep as possible into Lee Atwater's filthy bag of scorched-earth, ratfucking tricks for something -- anything -- to destroy their opposition.
AARP GETS THE SWIFT VETS TREATMENT....In my continuing quest to prove that a picture is worth a thousand words, here's your picture of the day. Via Josh Marshall, it's a screen capture from the American Spectator site of an ad from USA Next, a loony right group that thinks of itself as the conservative alternative to AARP. Apparently "the real AARP agenda" is to endorse gay marriage and disband the military.
I’d like to ask some blunt questions: Do you want more taxes taken out of your earnings? Do you want more unelected bureaucrats taking over more details of your life and your family’s life? Do you want federal regulators making your health choices, instead of you, your family, and your doctor? Do you want government regulators to control the investment and retirement decisions of your family, instead of you?
If you answered “Yes,” then AARP is your group....
If the last 25 years has proven any one fact beyond dispute, it is that as long as there are no adults around who are willing to loudly point a finger at the Right and say, over and over again --
"Those fuckers right there are why we are in this mess. Not "shrill" people. Not the ACLU. Not ACORN. Not Keith Olbermann. Not Tony Rezko. Not some non-existent Commie Leftists left over from the Jack Chick and John Birch Society porn you keep hidden under the mattress for emergency, midnight hate-wanks. Not both sides, equally and always. No. It. Is. Those. Fuckers. Right. There."
-- we will never be able to have a sane, responsible public dialogue about anything in this country ever again.
Or “How is the Obama Administration trying to kill old people and veterans this week?”
On “Fox News Sunday” Jim Towey, (president of Saint Vincent College and former director of the Bush White House Office for Throwing Tax Money at Fundies) explains how the Liberal Veteran’s Administration it planning to drive people to kill themselves.
Chris Wallace: Really?
Towey: Yes. Because the Gummint has a financial stake in killing old people and the disabled.
Wallace: Golly.
Towey: Golly indeed, Chris. Golly indeed.
Wallace: Who is this “Dr. Pearlman” bastard who wrote this document (holds up document) that tells veterans to kill themselves?
Towey: He used red-blooded American Taxpayer Money to research his Pamphlet of Doom. He influences the Obama Administration’s “Kill the Veterans” policy and yet nobody knows who he is.
driftglass: Pssst. Nobody knows who you are either. Of course, when they find out, you may have to leave town.
Wallace: To be fair, some people might say that Barack Obama doesn’t want to kill veterans.
Towey: It could be that he doesn’t know about this pamphlet, and has left the actual mechanics of snuffing the last of The Greatest Generation to the Sinister Liberal Underbosses who work for him.
Wallace: I just pissed myself in terror. Is the VA going to try to kill me?
Towey: Are you a veteran?
Wallace collapses in laughter.
Towey: Oh yeah. I forgot. This is Fox.
Skipping lightly over to “Meet the Press”, we find David Gregory dressed up in Jack Nicholson’s Joker castoffs and playing journalist.
Gregory: The President has backed off of his support for a public health care option, hasn’t he?
Chuck Schumer: No, he hasn’t.
Gregory: Sure he has.
Schumer: Not one little bit.
Gregory: Yes he has.
Schumer: No, he hasn’t.
Long, dramatic pause that s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s out and out and o-u-t….
Gregory: Yes he has!
Schumer: No, he hasn’t.
Gregory: Yes he has.
Schumer: No, he hasn’t.
Gregory: Yes he has.
Schumer: No, he hasn’t.
Gregory: The CBO said ten million people would go into a public insurance plan.
Hatch: I said tens of millions.
Gregory: Ten million people is different than tens of millions of people.
Hatch: No it’s not.
Gregory: Yes it is
Hatch: No it’s not.
Gregory: Yes it is
Hatch: No it’s not.
Another brilliant, lengthy pause during which I re-grouted the lakefront between Foster Avenue and the Oak Street Beach.
When I got back…
Gregory: Yes it is!
Hatch: No it’s not.
Gregory: Curse your wily ways, Hatch!
Gregory then just tosses the keys to "his" show to Republican henchman Joe Scarborough, who left skidmarks up one side Tavis Smiley and down the other.
Typical exchange --
Joe Scarborough: Obama never for one fucking minute tried to be “bipartisan” about health care.
Gregory: Yeah! Suck it!
Tavis Smiley: I agree witch you, but…
Thanks, Tavis. Thanks a bunch.
Scarborough just rambled on and on, largely uninterrupted, PEZ-ing out little gems like:
The problem is the hate speech on both sides.
Got that? Because in case you missed it, Joe Scar obligingly sledgehammered that lie home over and over again
The hate speech on both sides…
… on both sides.
… on both sides.
… on both sides.
While Gregory nodded eagerly, and Smiley scrambled to be affable and agreeable and tuck a word in here and there between pauses in Scarborough’s rambling. Smiley has done good work on other occasions, but here he sounded like he was trying out for the Juan Williams role in the Fox News Sunday touring company.
Very disappointing.
Gregory: Next up; just how supergreat was Bob Novak?
On ”The Chris Matthews Show” Joe "Jokeline" Klein mourns the decline in international journalism and the consequent loss of “Haircuts in Kabul” stories, while Chris Matthews’ crew demonstrates they still can’t quite get their shit together
Tweety started by accidentally explaining why he is light-years past his cultural sell-by date when he said:
We loveses the media in Murrica! On teevee, we like watching stuff like this.
And down at the nickelodeons, the kids can't get enough of talkies like “The Front Page” (from 78 years ago) and “All The President’s Men” (from 33 years ago)
Bob Woodward explained that he is optimistic that journalism will survive the mass extinction of newspapers.
Woodward: The future is with what Tina Brown does.
Woodward: And teevee. And magazines. And suchlike. Why I hear “Boy’s Life” is offering two cents a word! And if the “news” isn’t “available” for free, the “young people” will develop “business models” (like Tina) and it will work and people will make money.
Tina Brown: What we don’t yet have are the “budgets” to do all that investigative “reporting”. So the “business model” isn’t quite there yet. Mostly everyone is just scared out of their minds.
driftglass: Well, at least there's a plan.
Matthews: What is Murrica going to be like when we have our coffee and look out onto the driveway, and there’s no paper there!? Won't the survivors envy the dead?
driftglass: What’s a “driveway”?
Matthews: Right now people are mediajacking (tm) from places like the Washington Post and reselling in a secondary market. When’s the WaPo gonna get that money back?
Woodward: Well, the young “whippersnappers” haven’t worked out the “business model” yet. But when they do, boy howdy!
Matthews: Yeah, but whose gonna pay to get Jokeline’s beard Martinized in Kabul?
Jokeline: Right now, Time Magazine pays for that, but even they don’t have the money anymore for the little potpourri bags for my underpants. Later, on the internets, someone else will figure all this out, and I’ll be back to my ass smelling like dried apples and juniper berries.
Matthews: Wha’ about fact checking?
Gloria Borger: We fact check. Our editors fact check.
Matthews: But da bloggers. Da bloggers don’t fact check.
Brown: Have any of you all even heard of The Googles? There is no information that is not available online now. This idea that fact checking has to be separate from reporting is absurd.
Matthews: But dat’s not fact checking! Perry White didn’t use The Googles! People over at Vanity Fair and suchlike check stories out line-by-line.
Brown: Yeah. Using Teh Internets!
Jokeline: You know who fact checks us? Our readers. Why do you know how rich I’d be if I had a dollar for every time some dirty fucking hippie called me out for being a tool? (pauses to do the math). Uh, never mind.
Borger: There is a difference between the quality of the fact checking and the quality of the journalism.
Borger: Blogging is very solitary. And soul-killing. Like bee keeping. Or serial midday peep show autoerotic asphyxiation.
Matthews: Can The Online do it?
Brown: Sure! All they need is the will. And the budget And the editorial rigor…
driftglass: And all I need for a ham and cheese sammich is some ham…and some cheese…and some bread…
Epilogue: Someday someone somewhere will come up with some trick for making money doing journalism, at which point Rosalind Russell will rise from the grave to fetch in Chris Matthews’ slippers and morning paper, and all will once again be right with the world.
On “This Week” – during the long summer of Health Care and economic collapse -- 2008 Presidential loser John “The economy is not my strong suit” McCain makes his 22,987th appearance on the Mouse Circus to star in this week's exciting episode of "The Trifleman" in which Pa McCain takes lil' George Stephanopoulos camping. Shows him how to catch a fish. Start a fire.
After which Stephanopoulos grills him mercilessly on the status of the U.S. military.
Stephanopoulos: Exactly how awesome is our military, pa?
McCain: Very awesome, Georgie-boy. Very awesome.
Stephanopoulos: Do you think your party is trying to fuck over Obama as a sleazy political tactic?
McCain: Gosh, I hope not.
*sigh*
The Panel offered a little redemption, however, as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich beat Frum and Will like toy drums.
George Will: The problem isn’t that American health care is an internationally embarrassing disaster. The problem is Obama is too shrill.
Paul “The Shrill One” Krugman: I feel like it’s 2004 again, where saying something that is undoubtedly true is considered shrill.
driftglass: For Republicans, it is always 2004. Or the day Reagan ascended bodily to Heaven.
Paul Krugman: The thing is that when we talk about bipartisanship is that people usually think about getting the Center. Of getting the “20 Senators in the middle”. The problem is, the “20 Senators in the middle” are all Democrats. The Republicans have become a rump on the Right.
And "boom" went the dynamite.
The difference between Krugman and Reich’s synchronized shredding and Tavis Smiley’s palooka performance on “Meet the Press” on virtually the same issues is that people like Krugman not only master their facts, but they are unafraid to tell the truth.
They call liars “liars”.
They call hypocrites “hypocrites”.
And unsurprisingly, to people like Joe Scarborough and George Will -- whose livelihood depends on keeping the lies spinning – this “undoubtedly true” talk sounds at best “shrill”, and at worst like “hate speech”.
“The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.”
-- Voltaire
OK, so my graphic is of a tool set and not a watch. (A very fine set of [no kidding] "King Dick professional quality socket ended Nut Spinners" if you want to get specific about it.) So bite me, because the point is the same: however infuriating the professional liars on Right may be on camera and in print, they are, in the end, just tools in someone else's toolbox.
The Lanny Davis disease and America's health care debate
…
Davis frequently injects himself into political disputes, masquerading as a "political analyst" and Democratic media pundit, yet is unmoored from any discernible political beliefs other than: "I agree with whoever pays me." It's genuinely difficult to recall any instance where he publicly defended someone who hadn't, at some point, hired and shuffled money to him. Yesterday, he published a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico -- solemnly warning that extremists on the Far Left and Far Right are jointly destroying...
Snip 2:
But Davis parades around as -- and is treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well.
He's presented by numerous media outlets as an independent analyst who opines on the news of the day -- yet does so almost exclusively in order to promote the interests of those who are paying him, relationships which are often undisclosed…
Snip 3:
He has been a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable, CNBC and network TV news programs.
He has published numerous op-ed/analysis pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other national publications....
Snip 4:
Davis' new piece in The Hill and Politico demonstrates how this works. Presenting himself as the Responsible Liberal-Centrist, he warns of what he calls "The Dangerous Joining of the Far Right and Far Left." He argues that "the extreme left and extreme right share more in common than those on their own side of the ideological divide
...
What is missing from Glenn’s piece – and from the rest of the media – is an active voice regarding one, very specific matter: the identity of the decision-maker behind each, specific act of journalistic atrocity.
A newspaper, or a magazine, or a radio program, or a teevee show are all artifacts, and the placement of specific editorials or print opinion pieces are carefully shaped and edited into a pre-determined length or duration by many hands.
For those of us who repose these hot summer days in the gentle shade of our enormous piles of rejections letters from magazine editors, small presses, editorial boards and book publishers, we KNOW there is vastly more to Mr. Lanny Davis “…publish[ing] a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico” than him doing what we do – assembling our very best words into sentences, bricking them into vivid, thoughtful paragraphs, crossing our fingers and then sending the off to Mr. Editorial Board Gatekeeper, after which we wait…
...and wait…
...and wait…
…until the rejection letter arrives, and then we send ‘er out again (Simultaneous submissions being unforgivably crass, or so says the received wisdom of the scribbling classes.)
Mr. Lanny Davis is not “treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well.”: he is treated that way by specific people within those media organizations.
People with names. With work phone numbers, email address, LinkedIn accounts, and various other phyla of professional contact information.
What you are looking at when trip over another steaming pile of faux Centrism being sold by the pound by Mr. Davis…or another blood-slick gobbet of hackery left behind by William Kristol like a slime trail as he meanders from one incredibly prestigious position to another (from Time Magazine, to the New York Times, to the Washington Post and counting)…or when we flick on the teevee and see a jaw-droppingly talentless, wingnut sex-doll like Michele Malkin sneering out at us from one of the very few seats reserved every week at the Mouse Circus for Serious Analysts…you are not seeing the product of fluke or coincidence.
What you are looking at are the toxic consequences of the decisions of some specific person.
Knowing full well what a poisonous hobgoblin she is, someone at ABC actively decided, “Hey, let’s put that Malkin shrike on! That’ll get ‘em talking.” That decision was seconded by another ABC employee, and then approved by still another employee at ABC.
Of course, once upon a time, a bazillion years ago when George Stephanopoulos was a guest on the show he now hosts, he had radically different standards (from the invaluable Media Matters here):
George Stephanopoulos's "threshold of credibility," then and now
August 03, 2009 11:24 am ET by Jamison Foser
George Stephanopoulos as a guest on ABC's This Week in 1996:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I think that someone has to- should have to pass a bare threshold of credibility before they're put on the air to millions of viewers. You know, his story couldn't get past the fact checker at The National Enquirer, so I think before ABC News puts him on, then there should be some questions asked.
But someone else signs Stephanopoulos’ checks these days, and so he tucks that now-professional-inconvenient sense of morality up between is legs and...
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: With that, we bring in ... Michelle Malkin, syndicated columnist, also the author of the new book Culture of Corruption.
The disease is pandemic. Consider that, knowing full well what an abject and lethal failure William Kristol has been for years and years, some specific person gave that piece of shit one of the most coveted op-ed jobs in America. And then – just like George Bush -- when Kristol fucked that gig up, someone gave him another one.
And when he fucked that one up too?
Surprise!
Yet another someone gave this Hero of Free Market Meritocracy yet another job at which he has embarrassed himself like clockwork ever since.
Now of course, no one with a functioning cerebellum is ever going to mistake the denizens of FoxNews or Regnery Publishing or Hate Radio as anything other than $2 Conservative ideological handjob hookers, but if an ordinary American culture war civilian were to trip over one of them all tarted up on “real” media to look like a “real” journalist or expert, that civilian might mistake their opinions as valid and worthwhile.
We all know people, who know people. We are all six degrees of exasperation from these “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (to borrow a phrase from Percy Shelley) whose anonymous decisions foist the Malkins, the Davises, the Kristols and all the others on us week after week after week.
It was Krislov who came out swinging early in the segment, with Stone, who backs the parking meter lease deal, getting some defensive jabs in. Finally, Dumke jumped into the fray, going toe to toe with Stone, driving "The Grump" into a defensive tailspin
It didn't seem that Stone was taking very kindly to the ass whuppin' Dumke was giving him on the facts of the deal. Often, as it is in politics, the old guard doesn't like to get schooled by young bucks like Dumke.
The problem for Stone was, outside of the people who originally wrote the several pounds of lease deal, know one knows the details of this deal better than Dumke.
You see, unlike most of the City Council, he actually read the deal. ...
Once upon a time, Da Mare of the third largest city in the American Empire had a problem: He was broke. Not really-really, of course; really-really, Da Mare of the third largest city in the American Empire was sitting on a pile of dough a mile high, but Da Mare of the third largest city in the American Empire had decided that that dough was gonna pay for the last and grandest of Hizzoner's vanity projects.
So Da Mare of the third largest city in the American Empire drew his Cape of Many Tantrums over the mile high pile of dough and, whammo!, it was...gone!
Not gone-gone, of course; merely obscured in plain sight by a potent, pop-skull brew of mayoral will, a complacence citizenry and a mostly pigeonhearted press.
So not broke, but "broke", and being "broke", Da Mare of the third largest city in the American Empire had to raise "revenue" and/or cut costs.
The cost cuts are relatively straightforward; lay off a bunch of people and put the rest on "You're lucky to even have a job" half-rations.
Raising revenues is harder, because, however much lipstick you slather on that even-toed ungulate, it requires dinging the public with a new fee or fine or tax or surcharge. And that, in turn, requires aldermen do the one thing that horrifies most of them above all else: to stop pandering and preening and tub thumping and behave like responsible public servants.
It requires them to lead, in a system that has been meticulously designed and cleverly upgraded -- decade after decade -- to be Da Mare's personal political puppy-mill: a machine for producing litter after litter of loud, colorful, neutered buffoons and weeding out anyone with any trace of leadership ability, lest such a person one day grow up to pose even the faintest threat to the Daley Autocracy.
So, for example, one modification which would save the city tens of millions of dollars almost overnight would be cutting back on the number of aldermen.
Consider that the City of Los Angeles somehow gets by with one city counsilor for every 166,000 citizens (3.8 million residents/15 city councilors), while New York City has one city counsilor fur every 253,000 of its inhabitants (8.3 million resident/50 city council members ).
Chicago, on the other hand, pays a small fortune to maintain a one alderman (and his or her retinue) for every 50,000 Chicagoan in what it , on paper, was supposed to be a part-time job.
Chicago City Council: highest paid overall Salaries and number of aldermen among highest in nation
The Chicago City Council spends more on its own salaries than most other cities, according to an analysis of salary figures.
This year Chicago will spend nearly $5 million of taxpayers? money paying 48 of its 50 aldermen $98,125 a year (two others receive $85,000), according to the 2006 city budget. Aldermen?s jobs include everything from arranging for garbage pickup to voting on citywide legislation.
Chicago?s 50 aldermanic wards rank second only to New York?s 51, even though New York has slightly more than 5 million more people.
The expensive salaries have caused some in Chicago think condensing the number of wards would combat government overspending.
"Seeing as we are always in some sort of budget crisis, maybe the city should think about possibly reducing how many aldermen we are paying," said Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association, a Chicago-based group that investigates and researches government waste and inefficiency. "It would be a major change, but I think it would be something that would benefit more than just our pockets." ...
And which will never happen for two, interdependent reasons:
Aldermanic clout and privilege are dug into the system like ticks, and the council will never permit their sweet, recession-proof/budget-crisis-immune 100K/year part-time jobs to be put at risk, and,
Reducing the number of aldermen by, say, half would effectively double the power and influence of the survivors...making each one of them that much more potentially dangerous to Da Mare's political interests.
And nothing whatsoever is permitted to endanger Da Mare's interests.
So when it came time to do something like raising the parking rates -- which is what this was always all about -- Chicago's over-paid political invertebrates outsourced the icky, unpopular, grownup job of actually taking responsibility for their decision.
Traded away a valuable public asset to a team of pinstriped Sin Eaters (from Wikipedia)
Sin-eater
The term sin-eater refers to a person who, through ritual means, would take on by means of food and drink the sins of a deceased person, thus absolving his or her soul and allowing that person to rest in peace. In the study of folklore sin-eating is considered a form of religious magic.
This ritual is said to have been practiced in parts of England and Scotland, and allegedly survived until modern times in Wales. Traditionally, it is performed by a beggar and certain villages maintained their own sin-eaters. They would be brought to the dying person's bedside, where a relative would place a crust of bread on the breast of the dying and pass a bowl of ale to him over the corpse. After praying or reciting the ritual, he would then drink and remove the bread from the breast and eat it, the act of which would remove the sin from the dying person and take it into himself.
to buy the right to go on Chicago Tonight
and wheeze angrily that it wasn't their fault that the public was getting screwed.
now officially owes everyone in the motherfucking world a motherfucking apology.
The line forms on the Left.
By now you all know that Tom Ridge has confirmed that yet another Crazy Liberal Conspiracy Theory (#122, filed between "But...Iraq doesn't have a nuclear program..." and "Wow, it sure as shit looks like Karl Rove has been using our nation's U.S. Attorneys like a bunch of Chicago precinct thugs.") turned out to be true...
Tom Ridge kisses and tells on Bush’s ‘terror levels’ By Brad Knickerbocker | 08.20.09
For those who had their doubts about the politics behind the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” Tom Ridge’s new book will fuel long-held suspicions.
The former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, who was the first head of the Department of Homeland Security, says two top Bush officials – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft – pressured him to up the terror alert level before the 2004 election, according to promotional materials by publisher Macmillan.
“Ridge also charges that he was often ‘blindsided’ during daily morning briefings with Bush because the FBI withheld information from him, and says he was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings,” reports AFP. ...
Golly, Buffalo Bob! You mean a bunch of Republicans deliberately lied about matters of life-and-death in order to terrorize the public into a stampede that they could then manipulate to their political advantage?
And they got away with it?
Pardon me as I perish in shock.
In a country not in the thrall of bunch of locked-ward asylum patients masquerading as a political party, this story would have ended with the sentence: "George Walker Bush and other leaders of the conservative domestic terrorist group are at present negotiating with authorities and are expected to surrender themselves into the FBI custody shortly."
I don’t recall the precise details of his election, and I don’t remember the exact date when the American public voted large Republican majorities into both Houses of Congress in order to make it easier for him to work his will, but I’m sure one of those lesser-known Senate procedural rules or traditions makes it all as legal as seawater.
How the most popular, All-American, straight-arrow, fresh-copy-on-grandma's-coffee-table-every-week magazine in the history of the world drove itself into bankruptcy?
My grandfather was one of those Depression-era heroes that we could sure use more of right now. A church-going, hillbilly Liberal who charged into the working world with a rudimentary education, who was competent at every-damn-thing he turned his hand to, and who he kept a roof over his family's head during the worst economic crisis in American history by going where the work took him -- from dam-building to munitions plants -- even if that meant crisscrossing the continent in pre-interstate America.
And through faith, family, and years of hard work on his union jobs, my Liberal hillbilly granddad bootstrapped himself into the American Middle Class.
I have his clock on my mantle, some pictures, and the straight-razor and strop he carrier with him wherever he went, but my greatest inheritance from him -- handed down to me through my mom -- was his voracious love of reading. And some of my most vivid memories of him always feature a Reader's Digest Condensed something-or-other open next to his bed, or on the table, or lovingly displayed on book shelves he probably built himself.
I suppose, in my mind, the Reader's Digest was one of those things that was supposed last forever: a small but indispensable rung on the American ladder up which decent, industrious people like my grandfather could ascend to a life of relative security and comfort.
Of course nothing lasts forever, but I find the fact that it met its fate so cheaply, ignobly and predictably -- leveraged to death and sold off to make a few greedy, short-sighted people incrementally more wealthy, just like so many other middle class American institutions -- terribly sad.
In which the last 15 years never happened and the 90s continue forever and ever and ever.
On “This Week”, Anne Kornblut of the WaPo announced the surrender of the beleaguer remnants of American Media when she said [of Sarah Palin]:
Here she is actually driving the debate whether its honest or not, whether what she is saying is true or not…
Formal surrender ceremonies will take place on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan at a date and time of the victor’s choosing, because in our New Media World, the Queen of the Pig People is officially permitted to drive our national debate, whether she is lying or not.
Former Governor Sarah Palin made some preposterous claims over the weekend which attracted mainstream media attention. She made up the term "death panel" and claimed that part of the health care reform bill now working it's way through Congress required that families with children with disabilities, or elderly people who are infirm, could be judged by one of these death panels, which could control their fate and decide if they would die. GOP leadership repeated this outrageous claim across the airwaves on the Sunday morning talk shows. The mainstream media gave this claim credibility simply by repeating it.
My wife and I have practiced medicine for over forty years combined. There is no truth now, nor has there ever been any truth to the idea that the government encourages euthanasia or infanticide.
Our country is in trouble. Claims like these are routinely refuted by people who know better, but they are recirculated because they are sensational, and the MSM purports to take a balanced position without a thoughtful assessment of the facts. Fox News actually has people on in support of these outrageously false claims.
In fact, these kinds of claims are lies. There is no nice way to say it. …
And in a Media World where open, obvious, verifiable lies and the liars who spread them are officially give the same weight as the truth, the only questions worth asking any longer are:
Who makes that decision that people like Sarah Palin should be afforded any portion of our national airwaves whatsoever?
What are those people’s names?
Where do they hide?
How can we reach out to them and let them know how very, very, very unhappy we are that they are fucking up our country?
Why aren't their names and faces spread all over the internet?
This week, the former House Majority Leader was back baby!
Yes, just like Michelle Malkin last week, noted Conservative Liar -- Dick Armey – inexplicably managed to worm his way onto a Major Sunday Show this week.
There he sat on “Meet The Press”, slurring and smirking along like Bizarro Dean Martin’s own, personal portrait of Dorian Gray…wringing his little paws…and lying with the open, joyous abandon of a four-year-old who just discovered the magical power of making shit up.
David Gregory: Dick Armey, you have amped up the crazies, scared the Hell out of them, given them their talking points, and pointed them at Barack Obama’s head. Do you bear some responsibility for the tone of these meetings?
Armey: Ya know, I had mah differences with President Bush, George W. Bush…but when MoveOn dot Org ran those ads comparing George Bush to Adolph Hitler, I though it was despicable.
Rachel Maddow: They didn’t do it.
Gregory, being Gregory, just dropped the leash on his GOP mongrels early on, leaving them free to ramble, maunder, fart, scratch and dissemble all they wanted.
Maddow: They didn’t. They never ran an ad comparing…
Armey: Shut your pie-hole, little girl. And get me a fucking highball!
So what really happened in those long-ago-days of 2004?
Well, MoveOn ran a video contest – ''Bush in 30 Seconds” – that elicited over 1,500 entries.
It was a contest, got it? Anyone can submit anything, to be voted up-or-down by the organization as a whole, and two of those 1,500 entries compared Bush to that Hitler guy.
In a sane and fact-based Universe, the fact that neither of these submissions was endorsed by the votes of its members, and that both of these submissions were immediately disavowed by MoveOn’s leadership (from the NYT, January 6, 2004) --
... Wes Boyd, a MoveOn.org founder, fired back, saying Republicans were ''deliberately and maliciously'' misleading the public by asserting that MoveOn.org had sponsored the advertisements. ''None of these was our ad,'' Mr. Boyd said in a statement. ''Nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund.'' ...
-- would settle any and all questions about whether MoveOn ever endorsed or ran any advertisements comparing Commander Cuckoo Bananas to Herr Schiklgruber.
Of course if Modern Conservatives operated in a sane and fact-based manner, they’d be Liberals. Instead, right before our eyes, the Wingnut Lies of 2004 become Dick Armey’s Wingnut Gospel of 2009.
Sitting across from Armey was Republican Oklahoma Senator and fellow Outrageous Liar, Tom Coburn, who says the following when asked about his wingnut followers rage-dancing themselves into Timothy McVeigh-levels of anti-Gummint hatred (link is to the video from C&L):
Coburn: …we’ve earned it. … The tone is based on fear of the loss of control of their own Gummint. We have lost the confidence of the people…We have raised the question whether we are legitimately looking after the people’s long term interest.
Coburn: The mail volume of all the Senators didn’t go up based on the health care debate. The mail volume went up when we started spending away our future indiscriminately…
Because Coburn fucking well knows that his Party’s low-information goons first started running in hair-on-fire circles, screaming that they were losing their country to “socialists” and blowing shit up back in the boom days of the 1990s. Back when the Clinton Administration was producing balanced budgets, millions of new jobs and surpluses while kicking millions off of welfare, and making political hay bashing gays.
By the Coburn's metric of What Angries Up the Pig People, Conservative should have been joining hands with the Centrist Democrat and enjoying a wingnut Golden Age.
But instead, Conservatives rose to power and crippled the Clinton Presidency by feeding the Pig People enough lies
to drive them wild in the streets.
And then, for eight long, ugly, Cheney-soaked years...nothing.
Mere moments before, for these very same people, impeachment followed by a public flogging was hardly a sufficient penalty for a guy who had delivered peace, prosperity and a balanced budget, but who had lied about getting a blowjob. And yet as catastrophe piled on catastrophe...as treason, corruption, torture, incompetence, criminality, paranoia, authoritarianism and Coburn's whole “spending away our future indiscriminately” thing flourished under President Cheney as never before in modern history...Coburn’s "Clinton Killed Vince Foster" Patriots distinguished themselves either by remaining as silent as the grave, or rousing themselves to scream “Traitor!” at anyone, anywhere who dared voice any opposition to their Dear Leader:
Yes, somehow, Coburn’s Patriots only managed to discover their great love of the Constitution and fiscal responsibility 10 seconds after the Black Democrat took the oath of office.
Sorry, fucko, but after living eight years dozing in a web-o-lies hammock slung between Dick Cheney's asscheeks, you and your entire orc horde forfeited your right to question anyone else's motives or patriotism
for the next 20 years.
And that’s how Sunday went.
Armey: Some guy somewhere in teh internets in Connecticut said something about something we were doing that wasn’t true. So we're not responsible for anything. And I believe I said something about a highball.
Coburn: Fuck YEAH we should all be armed and terrified!
Maddow: Facts, facts, fa...
Gregory: Hush now, missy. The Menfolk are talkin’
Maddow’s only mistake – and it was a small but noticeable one – was forgetting that she wasn’t the show’s host. Where she should have moved in for the kill, as an advocate should do, she instead listened respectfully and let the two GOP fucks burn airtime.
All in all she did well as anyone could who was trying to fight off a barrage of dissolute old man beerfarts with a nail gun. And of course it would have been even better if she’d had a tag-team member who could help her work the body, instead of Tom Daschle.
Sadly but unsurprisingly, Daschle – who took his “mealy” elocution lessons from Harry Reid -- was his usual, cold-watery-porridge-self
