Stenographers to Liars

posted by Armadillo Joe

Considered against the backdrop of the kerfuffle between Nico Pitney and Dana Milbank this week (appropriately covered by Broadway Carl's DBOTW yesterday), Dan Froomkin's firing makes perfect sense. The big, fat, well-trained and meekly compliant traditional media is accustomed to strolling the cocktail party circuit in Washington D.C. like some roly-poly dog at a suburban pool party trolling for scraps off the grill. They fear anything that threatens to muss up that really cozy deal they've got for themselves wherein they unquestioningly re-print the lies of those in power in exchange for "Access" which gives them the panache to be blow-dried media celebrities which gets them on the list to receive the lies which they re-print, etc...

Now, whether those lies bore out or not, whether they proved correct or not on a factual level (to say nothing of the underlying rightness and wrongness on a moral level) was less important than taking all possible measures not to upset the very lucrative, reputation-enhancing apple cart. So Milbank gets his knickers in a twist because a DFH (a blogging DFH, popular with the rabble) gets to speak with the president over a room full of people who have scraped and bowed and crawled through shit to be among the soulless but powerful chosen few. All that guy ever did was talk to a people in Iran, collect sources, do his homework and act like he was a journalist or something. He never actually ate a cocktail weenie at any cozy little Washington parties, so he's just a nobody and a show-off who won't play ball.

And the Dirty Fucking Hippie Dan Froomkin (I mean, hell, look at the guy) simply never wanted to play ball either, which was fine when the captain of the red team was in the White House because Froomkin got to be a sop to all his fellow DFH's on the Inter-Webs while Very Important People went about the Very Important Business of Running The World.

But even after one of his moonbat lefties took the White House and all those DFH's invaded Congress, he continued to have -- you know -- standards, evenly applied, as though he had proved right about torture and Iraq and the economic meltdown and the domestic surveillance and all those Establishment-types had been proven wrong. Over and over and over again.

Hey, man, your guy's in office now -- ease up, OK? You're making us look bad.

So he had to go. And he does go. He goes out in a blaze of glory.

And he names names:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve.

[...]

The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Will somebody hire this guy, please?

Douche Quote of the Day, Part 4

posted by Armadillo Joe

"I think she'd say that her word choice in 2001 was poor"
- Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary

(sigh)

Why concede any ground at all when the wingnuts were well and truly about to implode into a fine red mist of degenerate racism and reprobate misogyny?

Why?

Washington D.C. is hard-wired for Republican Rule. As Atrios pointed out today, no matter how bad things may be for Republicans at any given moment (and they look pretty bad right now), the GOP will always enjoy a home field advantage in Washington. That's why we bloggers invented the term "Villagers" to describe all those Kewl Kidz who golf-clap their approval whenever some politician displays strength by punching a dirty fucking hippie in the face. Their incomes and class and economic upbringing and social status all make them part of a non-partisan ruling elite who nevertheless distrust an "Other" which usually resides in the Democratic Party. This reflexive distrust of the less monied, the less plugged-in, the less connected, the less powerful, the less glamorous -- frankly, hatred for the riff-raff -- gives them a natural affinity for the policies, procedures, arguments and methods of the Rethugli-goons, whose raison d'tre is to advocate for The Villagers -- not as "Villagers" per se, but simply as the rich, entitled, powerful people who expect special treatment that they are.

I mean, hell, Cheney's speech last week was presented by our MSM opposite Obama's like anything a potentially-indicted private citizen has to say about anything even remotely merits 1/10th the attention as an important speech by the sitting president. And Cheney reinforced that whole misguided notion by growling his way through a pro-torture "answer" to Obama national security speech, strutting and preening like the titular head of a government in exile, which to much of The Village he is.

So, now, the official stance of the White House is that some of the things Sotomayor said casually in a public forum almost ten years ago are out-of-bounds and, like that poorly-trained friend's dog we all know who will take the slightest breath of a hint of attention from a house-guest to jump and slobber and bark, a perpetually-in-search-of-conflict media pounces on the hairline fracture to split it wide-open. Shuster and Fineman nattered away on Hardball today like two old biddies in a sewing circle about the young hussy who just moved in down the street.

As digby said about it today:

Republicans were acting like crazed freaks, alienating Hispanics by the thousands and making women hate them even more, and the whole country was aghast. Why they gave them validation on this, I don't really understand.

[...]

this controversy will make it necessary for Sotomayor to bow and scrape before Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch. The wingnuts have been hoping for a chance for some payback for Thomas and maybe they'll get a pound of female flesh this time.

Two steps forward, three steps back.

...what he said...

posted by Armadillo Joe

As per usual, Atrios finds a way to say something far more succinctly than I ever could.

Regarding this whole "What-did-Nancy-know-and-when-did-she-know-it" non-scandal scandal, Atrios, in a post titled "Monsters," sez:

We should always remember the morality of Elite Villagers, those who supported the pointless war in Iraq and who mostly are now decidedly not horrified at the fact that the administration tortured the shit out of people in order to justify the atrocity that was the Iraq war. The Villagers loved their little war. It made them feel heroic. They wanted justification for it, too.

Amen, brother.

I don't remember which famous blogger said it first, but Washington D.C. is truly hard-wired for Republican rule. Which makes a certain amount of sense, actually. Money and power accruing in the capital city of the richest, most powerful nation the planet has ever known and perverting its policies and corrupting its priorities with regards to the well-being of that nation's entire population -- not just the wealthy ones -- is intuitively correct.

And, naturally, that money and power will trump whichever regional or religious or ethnic or socio-economic affinities may have driven the voters of any given district to elevate whichever huckster to national office. And it stands to reason that those elected hucksters will attract a great many hangers-on -- whether lobbyists or journalists or assorted wannabe "insiders" and unprincipled deal-makers -- who will all desire reflected glory or power or status and the money and priviledge those things can bestow. Whether pre-Revolutionary Russia or Imperial Rome or Versailles circa 1789, the whole thing eventually devolves into an insulated, closed loop of self-referential circle-jerking on route to unquestioned IMPORTANCE, because running the world is hard work and the rest of us should be more appreciative.

Those people are too IMPORTANT to really care about the little people who, you know, have to live with the policies they enact and lobby for and report about because, to them, being in Washington D.C. is not just a job but a lifestyle and everyone else around them is in that clique, too.

Whether making widgets in a factory or enabling and endorsing a torture-regime, a job's a job and we've all got to eat and pay rent, right?

Drudge rules their world.

Nope, try again

posted by Armadillo Joe

Apparantly, Keith Olbermann thinks that Rush Limbaugh's kidneys are off-limits:



And I would say to Keith that he can get all sanctimonious about a black comedienne saying something mean about the kidneys of a charter member emeritus of the white plutocratic Establishment to, oh I dunno, let's say um... Michael J. Fox:



Sorry, Keith, but the depth and putresence of Rush's œuvre makes every part of that porcine, drug-addled sex tourist's ample anatomy fair game for mocking and derision. If anything said about his shriveled, diseased body parts happens to shock! shock! the sensibilities of the insulated, fatuous media elite of D.C., well hey... live by the sword, die by the sword, motherfuckers.

Fuck Rush Limbaugh and screw you for taking his side in a fight.

Qualifications

guest posted by Armadillo Joe

George Stephanopoulos' Round Table this morning had five guests. One of those guests is a Nobel Prize winner and the only voice on the panel from the left. The other four range all the way from...

...a semi-accomplished journalist who, prior to butting heads with Bush43, was most notable for his eyebrows to...

...the pedigreed scion of a wealthy and powerful Louisiana political clan with an unremarkable career as a journalist and no other discernable accomplishments unrelated to her family connections to...

...a striving, middlebrow quasi-intellectual -- slightly more journalistically accomplished than the snotty patrician from Antebellum Dixie -- and an unrepentant apologist for the excesses of his economic superiors whose only redeeming quality appears to be that his love for the game of baseball drives a dislike for the New York Yankees but whose most meaningful public act to date is switching from a bow-tie to a straight tie (presumably to put cravattial distance between him and an unlettered little snot named Tucker) to...

...the poster-child for the abject failure of our nation's compensation system for the modern CEO class -- a woman who once steered a formerly venerable brand almost into the ground but was nevertheless rewarded with a golden parachute that would make other over-compensated fellow CEO-bloodsuckers blush with shame (before saying yes anyway) -- but was also somehow still considered a weighty enough person on economic issues to not only advise on a (failed) presidential campaign but also to successfully parlay what should have been yet another career-ending black mark on the resume into an opinion-making spot on a Sunday morning news magazine to spout self-serving GOP-HQ-issued platitudes like they're immutable axioms of the fundamental structure of the universe.

These are the people that the "reasonable" members of The Washington Village, our precious Versailles on the Hudson, deem fit to sit in judgement on the first week of an Obama presidency.

Egads, I hate this country's ruling class.