Page2RRS

• 03 Jul 2009 11:27

  THE ANSWER LIES IN THE WORLD OF WEYMOUTH! Weymouth was going to stage a soiree. To manufacture consent? FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2009 THE ANSWER LIES IN THE WORLD OF WEYMOUTH: By complete happenstance, Lally Weymouth’s first salon was going to be about health care. Weymouth is the pearl-swirling, upper-crust grand-daughter of former Post owner Katherine Graham. (Translation: Must be seen to be believed.) She became the CEO of Washington Post Media last year. The salon would have been held right in her manse—and darlings, everyone would have been there! Everyone who’s anyone in derailing health care, that is: KURTZ (7/3/09): Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth yesterday canceled plans for a series of policy dinners at her home after learning that marketing fliers offered corporate underwriters access to Post journalists, Obama administration officials and members of Congress in exchange for payments as high as $250,000. The fliers were approved by a top Post marketing executive, Charles Pelton, who said it was "a big mistake" on his part and that he had done so "without vetting it with the newsroom." He said that Kaiser Permanente had orally agreed to pay $25,000 to sponsor a July 21 health-care dinner at Weymouth's Northwest Washington home, and that Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) had agreed to be a guest. Pelton, who serves as general manager for conferences and events, said he had invited two-dozen business executives, advocates and presidential health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle. But a White House spokeswoman said no senior administration officials had agreed to attend, and an aide to DeParle said she had received no such invitation. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he was "appalled" by the plan. "It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli said. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post." The Post Co. fliers offered an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth." Darlings! Right in her home—and off the record! You know this really counts! Chances are, we’ll never really know how Pelton managed to bungle so badly. But let’s use this incident to understand the notion of “manufactured consent.” Beyond that, let’s use this incident to understand your nation’s long, near-lunatic non-discussion of health care reform. The long, near-lunatic non-discussion to which career liberals have given consent. Let’s make sure we understand who would have been at that dinner: Lally Weymouth, patrician publisher of the Post. Jim Cooper, the red-state Democrat (Tennessee) who played a large, leading role in defeating the Clinton health plan. Kaiser Permanente, one of the insurance giants which wants to undermine Obama’s health plan. Kaiser Permanente’s checkbook. Presumably, Ceci Connolly, the Post’s top reporter on health care. Darlings, everyone would have been there! Everyone who’s anyone in undermining real health reform. For the record, Connolly played the leading role the last time the Post waged an open war on your interests. And to this day, the career liberal world has shut its trap about that gross misconduct. We’ll be watching to see if the kids at your “liberal journals” play a little bit rougher this time. More about them later on. What was the point of this fine salon? In his opening paragraph, Kurtz attempts to define the problem: This dinner would have given a big corporate player like Kaiser Permanente “access to Post journalists, Obama administration officials and members of Congress,” Kurtz unconvincingly says. In paragraph four, the Post’s executive editor accepts this framework in denouncing this unseemly plan. "It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase,” he rails. But crackers! Big corporate interests like Kaiser Permanente already have access to major Post journalists. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t. It’s absurd to suggest that they don’t. An event like this would not be about giving Kaiser “access” to Connolly. This event would be about defining acceptable boundaries of thought and discussion within the Washington In Group. The Group would sit at Weymouth’s table, thrilled to have been invited there. And The Group would learn what you can and can’t say—if you want to remain in The Group. And don’t worry—the grasping losers who hand you your “news” do want to sit at that table! The want the career advancement such status implies. They long for the high social standing. How badly do they want to be there? In 2003, the grasping climber Margaret Carlson explained the process with remarkable candor in the 26-page autobiographical chapter which drove her semi-book, Anyone Can Grow Up (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/18/03). In that chapter, Carlson described the gruesome process by which she attained social standing inside DC’s elite. In her inspiring up-from-steerage tale, she—the child of working-class, Irish Catholic parents—ends up sitting at the right hand of Post publisher Katharine Graham! What a story! It all began when Michael Kinsley took her to a soiree—at the home of Weymouth’s grand-mother: CARLSON (page 22): My friends didn’t change from year to year, but their jobs did. It was Michael Kinsley...who first took me to dinner at the big, intimidating mansion of Katharine Graham, the reigning queen of Washington and publisher of The Washington Post. Every few weeks, when Henry Kissinger or Barbara Walters was stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia, I would get a late call asking if I’d like to fill in. Following the Meg Greenfield rule—call anytime before the main course—I always said yes. Eventually, I would go as me. Like the rings on a tree, my evenings with Graham charted my evolution from rookie journalist to old timer. “I always said yes,” this classic climber wrote. But when social climbers like the young Carlson agree to say yes, they are typically saying yes to more than a set of dinner invitations. They are also saying yes to the constellation of political views which guarantee them a continuing seat at such Very High Tables. They’re saying yes to what The Group believes. They’re saying no to everything else. Today, Carlson is one of the biggest fools in Washington. (She’s also a regular, simpering guest on our biggest “progressive” TV show! Surely, the gods rock with laughter.) But in her very valuable book, she gave us a very valuable look at the desire of these social/career climbers—the desire to gain acceptance at The Highest Washington Tables. But darlings! To gain acceptable at those tables, there are certain things you mustn’t say— mustn’t believe, contemplate or even discuss. Over the past fifteen years, one of the things you couldn’t discuss was this remarkable set of data—perhaps the most remarkable data-set we know of in the world: Total health expenditures per capita, 2003 United States $5711 Australia $2886 Austria $2958 Belgium $3044 Canada $2998 Denmark $2743 Finland $2104 France $3048 Germany $2983 Ireland $2466 Italy $2314 Japan $2249 Netherlands $2909 Norway $3769 Sweden $2745 United Kingdom $2317 Those are astonishing data. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve almost never been discussed. Everyone but Krugman understands—you simply mustn’t discuss them. Long ago, Kinsley took Carlson to Graham’s house. Last week, he wrote a column in which those data, though highly relevant, simply never appeared. That dinner at Lally Weymouth’s house wouldn’t have been about giving Kaiser Permanente access to Connolly. If anything, that dinner would have been about giving Weymouth access to her own reporters and editors—giving her the chance to show them where the lines have been drawn. On the national level, Rep. Jim Cooper is not well-known or highly visible. But he played a leading role in defeating Clinton’s health plan—and there he is in Kurtz’s report as Weymouth’s lone confirmed guest! At dinners like this, Washington’s sprawling collection of climbers learn what they’re allowed to think/discuss. And the pay-offs for consent are huge, as Carlson explained in her book. The heart-warming end to her Climber’s Tale involved her daughter’s wedding. By now, a reigning queen was simply “Kay” in this uplifting tale: CARLSON (continuing directly from above): One day Mrs. Graham complained that she’d never been asked to my house. A few months later, I was giving a going-away party for Kinsley, who’d been wooed to be editor of Slate.com by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. It seemed the perfect occasion to hide behind. She came, she tossed salad, she scooped ice cream. She became a fixture at my house. [...] When Courtney decided to get married in 2000, Kay asked if she would get married in her garden, and that began a wedding my mother would have been proud of. I didn’t make Courtney’s wedding dress, as my mother (and I) had made mine. She preferred one by Vera Wang, proving there can be progress from one generation to another. A generation of climbers got the message. Their daughters could get that Vera Wang too—if they were careful never to mention the actual shape of world health care. At such salons, consent gets manufactured within a grasping pseudo-elite. A Kaiser was going to pick up the tab. Was the grand-daughter of a “reigning queen” going to sketch her land’s boundaries? Ceci would have been there: Presumably, Ceci Connolly would have been there. As we noted earlier in the week, the children of the career liberal world have agreed, to this very day, not to discuss the astonishing things she did the last time around. (See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/30/09.) A list of some major players: In 1999, Dana Milbank and Charles Lane agreed to ignore her astounding performance. Both got hired by the Post. In 2000, Richard Wolffe told the truth about her work, anonymously—then never spoke up in his own voice. He got hired by Newsweek. Newsweek is owned by the Post. In 2000, Seth Mnookin couldn’t see what the fuss was about. He got hired by Newsweek. In 2006, Ezra Klein told the truth once, though he didn’t mention the Post or Connolly. He never told the truth about this matter again. He now works at the Post. Josh pretty much lied in your faces two separate times in the summer of 2002. In those days, he was still thinking about a mainstream journalistic career, as he told the Times last year. Citizens have almost never heard what Ceci did the last time around—because your heroes have kept their traps shut. Presumably, she would have been at Lally’s soiree. Manufactured consent! Ain’t it grand? OK, we’ll probably do it: What did they all agree to ignore? So you’ll have a better idea, we’ll probably post some (lengthy) material about Connolly’s work in 1999. Next week. Sorry, but no: We’ll let you manufacture the jokes about the Post’s “Lally-gagged” scribes.

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• 02 Jul 2009 14:56

  WE’RE ALL GAIL COLLINS NOW! Ed Schultz got left for dead–as Josh Marshall mooned about Sanford: THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2009 WE’RE ALL GAIL COLLINS NOW: Simpering, purring and diddling a nation, Gail Collins is back at it today. But let’s give credit where credit is due. At least she doesn’t pretend that she’s upset with all the hypocrisy: COLLINS (7/2/09): An Affair To Remember Before everyone finishes piling on Gov. Mark Sanford, let me say that all of us in New York were happy to learn that he has been scheduling his assignations in our state. Trust us: Collins will finish piling on Sanford about the time the cow jumps the moon. This morning’s effort represents her third straight column on the governor’s love life. She and her simpering role model, Dowd, have together devoted straight columns to this aggressive self-diddling. Nothing else exists for these ladies—only the governor’s affair. But then, why should progressives complain about this? Yesterday, Our Own Josh Marshall sat himself down; thought long and hard; and began to philosophize for young liberal readers. Josh had given a great deal of thought to an important topic: MARSHALL (7/1/09): JUST GO BE WITH HER! In part two of his leave-no-rock-unturned interview with the Associated Press, Mark Sanford says that at least he will "be able to die knowing I had met my soul mate,” as David [Kurtz] noted below. And if that’s not enough, he says that for all the grief his affair has caused, that if the affair means he can never run for president (think the ship's sort of sailed on that one), that it will have been worth it. I know there are a lot of people who are genuinely questioning Sanford's sanity at this point—when you put together the furtive trips and the endless new revelations. But am I the only one who thinks that he appears to be deeply in love with this woman and should just go be with her? [...] Josh’s very thoughtful pensées continued along from there. To be fully enlightened, just click this. Or you could just go rent Candy (click here). Josh rarely presents his own thoughts any more, except for the occasional haiku assembled from snark (click this). When he did to decide to expound on a topic, this was the topic he chose. But then, we’re all Gail Collins now! Which brings us around to Ed Schultz, a fellow who still almost isn’t. On last night’s Ed Show, Shultz had finally seen enough. He’d seen enough of the people with cancer who can’t get coverage in this country—people like Debby Smith, 53, who spoke with Obama at yesterday’s health care forum. Schultz has been discussing health care every night, though not effectively (keep reading). On MSNBC, this is allowed in the 6 PM slot, before the audience builds. Last night, he finally issued a challenge—a challenge to Republican senators. Please come to Toronto, he finally said. Let’s see how the Canadians do it! In the process, he referred to the “Debbies”—people like Debby Smith: SCHULTZ (7/1/09): I want to know how many Senate Republicans have gone on a field trip for health care to find out how other countries do it. Now, we know they go to Iraq for fact-finding missions. We know they go to Afghanistan. They do foreign relations type stuff. What about health care? You know that I can go to LaGuardia Airport, 20 minutes from here, and I can be in Toronto in one hour, arguably the best, the best health care system on the face of the earth in single-payer. Has any Republican senator gone to Toronto to find out the real story about the long lines, and people not being able to get the services they want when they need them? Or are there a bunch of Debbies up there? There must be a bunch of Debbies up there, the way the Republicans talk about health care. Heck, they’ve got all the answers! Tonight, on this program, I am challenging any Republican senator to come with me, to come with the steel workers, to come with the Service Employees Union. Let’s go to Canada... Let’s go up there and find out what the hell is really going on up there! Because somehow, they’ve figured it out and we haven’t been able to figure it out. But you know what? We spend twice as much money on health care than they do! Good God! In passing, he even mentioned the difference in per capita health care spending! Though he said it so quickly, and in such truncated form, that it likely flew by without notice. Please come to Toronto, Schultz said. Let’s fly to Toronto—it takes an hour—and learn about their health care system! But in that statement, you saw the soul of pseudo-progressive failure on this issue. Schultz, you see, is a major progressive. He’s a long-time talk radio host, from the northern tier of the country. A few years ago, Democratic Party leadership helped him advance to his current national platform. And yet, even at this late date, Ed Schultz doesn’t know squat about Canadian health care! A bit later on last night’s program, he interviewed Nancy Barto, a Republican state legislator from Arizona who opposes Obama’s health care proposals. In particular, Schultz explained, Barto has helped “put a constitutional amendment on the 2010 ballot that would ban nationalizing health care in that state.” Schultz wanted to know why she did that. And sure enough! In a very familiar exchange, Barto left Schultz for dead: BARTO: We are interested in health care reform, but we’re not interested in what is being discussed seriously in Congress. We want to protect ourselves against it. SCHULTZ: Well, the discussion is to get everybody covered. Now if the people of Arizona—I’m sure there’s millions there that don’t have insurance— What are they going to do to get it if there’s not a public option, if they can’t afford it? BARTO: Well, like I said, Ed, we are interested in many options. When people have the freedom to choose their own health care, and the right, which this act will guarantee, to have that health care provided in the state, there will be options. SCHULTZ: What’s so dangerous about a public option? What’s so dangerous about offering up something that people don’t have right now? BARTO: Well, Americans are too smart to accept another huge government program, because they have seen what we have already had and how it doesn’t work and how it does ration care. They have seen what other nations have been going through with their 900,000 people on a waiting list in Britain waiting for care, 25,000 Swedes waiting for heart surgery. SCHULTZ: That’s why I got to do a field trip. I got to go find out about all this stuff. Fifteen years after the failure of Bill Clinton’s health plan, this leading progressive has now decided to “find out about all this stuff.” Ed Schultz broadcast from Fargo for years. But he still doesn’t know how to respond to standard critiques of Canadian health care, such as the one made by Barto. But don’t worry! He plans to go now! In that completely pathetic exchange, you see the Potemkin heart and soul of America’s “progressive” pseudo-movement. Pseudo-progressives—people like Schultz—have been too dumb, too lazy, too uninvolved to assemble even the simplest facts and frameworks for arguing health care. Last night’s exchange was quite typical: Barto knew what objections to raise. Schultz had no idea how to respond. And our own brilliant Marshall was pondering hard—about who Mark Sanford should live with. Yesterday, we asked a simple question: Has anyone ever dumbed himself down to the extent that Josh Marshall has? Later that day, he gave you his answer: We’re all Gail Collins now. The very latest from Neverland: Are we Gail Collins now? Above, we described Schultz as someone “who still almost isn’t.” To his credit, he does discuss health care every night. Or at least, he pretends. But let’s be frank: We’re all Gail Collins. Schultz opened his program with health care last night—with his standard noisy thundering. But then, about twelve minutes in, the gentleman offered what follows. COBRA is a law which lets some people maintain health coverage after they leave a job: SCHULTZ: I speak for millions of Americans who have lost their jobs, who have lost their health care! And this COBRA thing is a fraud! That`s what COBRA is. It’s a fraud. You ever see the expenses of COBRA? So we’ll just let the—you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to let the Bush agenda just continue on with 40 great Americans in the United States Senate! Let’s go to Toronto! Let’s do a field trip! Let’s find out if anybody wants to go get the real story! Coming up, the King of Pop is outselling "The King!” Michael Jackson’s sales have now overtaken Elvis. This story is changing by the minute. We’ll have the very latest from Neverland, next. Speaking for millions of Americans who have lost their health care, Schultz promised “the very latest from Neverland, next.” In fact, he did two segments about Michael Jackson, and another on Mark Sanford’s love life. Barto came on the program later—and left Ed Schultz for dead.

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• 01 Jul 2009 18:45

  FINALLY! After all these years, the Times explores the merits of Canadian health care: WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2009 JOSH MARSHALL CAN’T COUNT TO SEVEN: How degraded has our pseudo-progressive movement become by this time? So degraded that we’ve reached the state where we can’t quite count to seven. Fallen? Inane? Sad/sick/soul-drained? What would be the word for the crap which appeared on Josh Marshall’s site yesterday, shortly after noon Eastern? Rachel Slajda was the progressive “reporter” who got a bit lost on her way to seven. And don’t worry—this doesn’t end here Sanford Admits More Trysts With Lover By Rachel Slajda - June 30, 2009, 12:14 PM South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who originally admitted to meeting his Argentine mistress four times in the past year, told the AP that the number is more like seven. Apparently there were five meetings in the last year, including “two multi-night stays” in New York. That's the first time he's admitted to trysts on U.S. soil. There were also two more meetings before the. The two first met in 2001. The AP interview was, unsurprisingly, "lengthy" and "emotional.” That’s what Slajda wrote in her short news report, exactly as she wrote it. Amazingly, her confused work was still sitting on Josh’s site at 9 o’clock this morning. (Her report was still being linked from the top of TPM’s front page.) A “late update” had been added. But the confusion over those very large numbers remained unaddressed. Slajda had the right heroes and villains—but her numbers were slightly confused. In her first paragraph, she said Sanford had met with his “mistress” in the past year more than the four times he’d originally claimed. According to Slajda, he had now told the AP “that the number is more like seven.” In the next paragraph, we were told (correctly this time) that the actual number is five. And no: As compared to four, five is “more like seven.” So it goes when simpering children are handed the keys to the web site. And here’s how it goes when the staff of a Big Dumb Oaf cuts-and-pastes from such a site, as the staff in question pretty much does every night: OLBERMANN (6/30/09): No politician has told so many salacious half-truths about his own love life since Sanford`s last news conference last week. In a new and remarkable interview, the governor, having originally admitted to only four meetings with his mistress over the past year, now putting that number at seven—seven that he is admitting to. The wild bull of the pampas now time-lining his extracurricular calendar with his Argentine friend like this: Five meetings with Maria Belen Chapur in the last year, including two, quote, “multi-night stays in New York.” It sounds like something he won on a game show. Also, two more meetings before then. Eight hours after Slajda misfired, our own Big Dumb Oaf went on the air and recited her work almost word for word—only choosing to drop her qualification about the number being more like seven. To wit: In the first paragraph cited above, Our Own Big Oaf reports that Sanford has admitted to seven “meetings with his mistress over the past year.” Immediately thereafter, Our Own Big Oaf reports that there have been “five meetings...in the last year.” His big dumb staff didn’t notice the contradiction. Neither did he—if he bothers reviewing his staff-written scripts before he parades on the air. How dumb has your pseudo-progressive world become? That’s how dumb, right there. And here’s the question to which this leads: Do you wonder why so brilliant a world has produced no frameworks on health care? Ten years ago, Josh Marshall was writing exceptionally smart, nuanced work for The American Prospect. You’re right—he took a large pass on the war being waged against Candidate Gore, in his own work and in the work he assigned as editor. But let’s be fair—Josh was young, and he had a future career to consider. As he told the New York Times in this profile, he was still imagining a possible career as a mainstream political journalist. And young liberals don’t get those careers—if they’re truthful about the work of the mainstream press corps. Was that ever part of Josh’s thinking? We have no idea. Today, Josh runs a site to which young people can turn for photographs of the apartment in which the “luv gov” (or the “randy right-winger”—two examples of TPM’s recent language) shacked up with his mistress. They can go there for photo lay-outs inside the home of John Ensign’s girl friend. It can feel very good to rub your thighs when you look at pictures like that! Although it’s the hypocrisy involved in all this which makes us progressives so mad. In short, Josh has turned into a first-class, low-IQ clown. (A first-class clown who makes decent money. In that same profile, he told the Times, ''I probably make in the neighborhood of what successful political journalists make.” That would be pretty good scratch.) Meanwhile, how sharp is the audience he has assembled with his pictorials on the lov guv? As of this morning, there were 51 comments to Slajda’s report. None of them inquired about its groaning contradiction. But then, Olbermann’s staff didn’t notice the contradiction—the contradiction Keith read on the air. In our entire life, we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone dumb himself down to quite the extent that Josh has. And no: You will get winning frameworks on major issues from a movement which has gone into the low-IQ pool the way his site has done in recent years. A progressive world this lazy and dumb will produce winning frameworks on health care—not in the face of the endless image-shaping which comes from deeply serious, well-financed forces on the pseudo-right. Go ahead. Reread what Olbermann told you last night. We’ve got your health care frameworks right there! And make no mistake: That’s what your progressive world has become. As we’ve said, we’re all Kenneth Starr now—except Starr was perhaps a bit brighter. In fairness, one distinction: Starr was troubled by the lying. It’s the hypocrisy which make us so mad. How dumb has your movement become: Sadly, this is the AP report to which Slajda linked. Sadly, Josh’s agent thought this report said the number was “more like seven.” Eight hours later, Our Own Big Oaf said the same damn thing. Almost one day later, her bungled report was still being linked, uncorrected, from the top of TPM. DUMBEST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: As we’ve told you, it’s Hard Pundit Law, enforceable by the Council of Experts. All press corps members must recite the cohort’s Approved Standard Scripts. For that reason, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus knew she had to type what follows, high up in today’s silly column about (groan) Mark Sanford’s wife: MARCUS (7/1/09): But Jenny Sanford presents a new and improved version of the betrayed political spouse—neither enabler nor victim. We're all too familiar with the usual drill, in all its excruciating permutations. In one, the wronged wife stands, looking stricken, by the side of the cheating pol as cameras whir. See Silda Wall and Eliot Spitzer, Suzanne and Larry Craig. As we told you last week: Pundits are required to recite this Standard Complaint concerning the way wronged wives will sometimes stand, looking stricken, by the side of the cheating pol. Maureen Dowd also ticks off this basic requirement, high up in her own nitwit column: DOWD (7/1/09): Stay focused, ladies. Here is The Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology. 1. Skip the press conference, especially when your husband is copping to call girls, gay pickups in airport bathrooms or “tragic” and “forbidden” telenovela-style love stories. Stoicism at the skunk’s side is overrated and, as Larry Craig’s wife learned, sunglasses don’t help. Mullahs always understand this. Until every mullah has issued a statement, the statement has not been made. Beyond that, the ladies disagree today in their dueling, waste-of-time columns. Marcus simply adores Jenny Sanford, a “new model for the wronged political spouse.” Dowd lumps Jenny in with the rest, calling her various names as she goes. Jenny Sanford turns out to be undignified, passive-aggressive and weepy. She sounds like a “stereotypical harridan,” Dowd insightfully says. Of course, no crisis goes to waste inside the high walls of Versailles. Dowd uses today’s column to wack around Hillary Clinton, and Larry Craig’s unnamed wife—and even Elizabeth Edwards! In the case of Edwards, this must have felt especially good. During the last campaign, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t be criticized because she seemed to be dying from cancer. Dowd was so frustrated by this restriction that she ended up venting her spleen at one point at the Edwards’ daughter, Cate, 25. (The youngster’s web site displeased Dowd.) Today, she finally gets to address the real problem. At last! Elizabeth Edwards comes to grief in guide-points 7-10. Is anyone dumber than the fools who live inside the walls of Versailles? In a related question: Do you wonder why these people do such a weak job with actual issues? That said, one part of Marcus’ column is worth special notice today. You’ve sometimes thought we were off base when we noted the way the Council of Experts tend to look down their long Yankee noses at those dumb white southerners. Today, though, Marcus confesses: MARCUS: I have to confess to, and apologize for, having preconceived notions about Jenny Sanford that turned out to have nothing to do with who she actually is. I heard “wife of conservative Christian governor,” saw the picture of her with those four well-groomed boys and figured her for someone who wouldn't have the spine to stick up for herself. Marcus is smart enough to omit one part of her confession. She omits the word “southern” from what she’d heard about Jenny Sanford. By now, she knows that Sanford grew up in Chicago—that she was even “an investment banker.” All is therefore well with the world! And yes, this is how this works. Gene Lyons has often written about the condescension brought to Arkansas in 1992 by the big-city Yankee reporters who invented the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, endlessly getting conned by local players in the process. As we’ve noted in the past, the fact that Clinton and Gore were both southerners did shape some of the press corps’ reactions. Remember: The mullahs who live inside Versailles’ walls are almost breath-takingly dumb. Your nation is thus in a world of hurt. Will be, until they’re evicted. FINALLY: We thought we’d never see the day! Finally, in today’s New York Times, we’re allowed to start learning the truth about Canadian health care. Credit given—and crow consumed! That done, let’s state the obvious: It’s very important that voters know the facts about the way that system works. After all, here are two nations’ per capita health care costs from the year 2003: United States $5711 Canada $2998 Good lord! Per person, we spent twice as much! If Canada’s health care is halfway decent, they’re doing something we should copy! Finally, the New York Times is starting to fill us in on how their system works! We get the low-down from David Rakoff,, identified as “the author, most recently, of Don’t Get Too Comfortable.” His piece is part of a sprawling, op-ed page homage to today, which is Canada Day In fairness, Rakoff keeps it short and sweet. No sense overloading the system: RAKOFF (7/1/09): There is no contest about what I miss most about Canada. It is universal medical coverage. Just thinking about it, and its absence here [in the United States], can send me into complete despair. But Canada Day is no time for tears, so instead I offer my First Runner-Up of Things Canadian Most Beloved: After Coffee Peppermints from Second Cup, a national chain of coffee shops not unlike Starbucks. I have no idea if the coffee is any good. I’ve bought only the mints, which come in cunning tin disks that open and close with a satisfying snap. These mints are, in a word, sublime; they are stronger, mintier and more refreshing than anything else on the market. Some of my (American) friends have to spit them out. Even their dimensions are more pleasing than other peppermints. Thicker than average, with mildly pillowed surfaces on top and bottom, they possess a muscularity bordering on belligerence, befitting their palate-cleansing brawn. And so tiny! More pharmaceutical than confection, they feel (almost) medicinal. —DAVID RAKOFF That should do it, the editors said. With that, we were returned to a slightly more normal pursuit: Dowd’s listing of ten key guide-lines for political wives who are wronged. By the way: All those wronged political spouses have access to excellent health care. And oh yes: In the past fifteen years, your progressive world has produced absolutely no frameworks with which we can successfully pursue progressive health care reform. Big newspapers failed to report on all those successful single-payer systems. And as they kept their big traps shut, your “liberal journals” all sat and stared. Young progressive writers and editors pretty much chose to sit this one out. Why do you suppose that is? We could suggest some ideas. Related question: On May 6, Naomi Klein appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, exactly as we’d demanded (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/7/09). Near the end of her monologue (Maddow clammed), she said that “the greatest heist in monetary history” is currently going down. It has now been almost two months. It’s weird, though! Have you seen Rachel invite her back to explain what she meant in more detail? Just a question for non-millionaire stooges: Why do you think we haven’t seen Klein get invited back on that program? Small suggestion: We’re getting fed a whole lot of “mistress” talk as that alleged heist rolls on. They who inform/entertain you: Last night, Alison Stewart filled in for Maddow, offering the latest in mistress chatter. Since 2006, Stewart has been married to Bill Wolff, head of this channel’s prime time news programs. Such as they are, of course. Wolff had zero background in news when he landed the job. Wolff’s mother was an associate general counsel for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis. But then, Stewart’s father was senior vice president for corporate affairs at Squibb Corporation, the pharmaceutical company in Princeton. We’re just saying. Click here. (Wolff’s father is a cardiologist.) Stewart has a winning smile and good hair. On the other hand, she’s been in news for twenty years. Can you name anything you know because of that fact? You know us! We’re just asking.

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• 30 Jun 2009 13:02

  THE ARRANGEMENT OF CECI AND DANA! Ceci and Dana are both in the news. The pair go way, way back: TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 2009 The so-called press corps’ mental horizons: On this bright, sunny morning, the front page of the Post’s “Style” section is truly a thing to behold. Three stories consume the vast bulk of its wasted space: Top left: “A Scandal Beyond Sex/A Smitten Sanford Exposes His...Love!” Neely Tucker finds the latest excuse to plow through those sexy-time e-mails. Below that: “No Higher Ground/Affair Can’t Hide In Ensign’s Other Las Vegas.” As part of a giant lay-out, Karl Vick explores the two Las Vegases—the seamy Strip and the upper-class neighborhood where John Ensign did his best screwing. The article features two large photos. One shows the fancy home of Ensign’s upper-end girl friend—the home she shared with The Man Ensign Wronged. Top right: “For Celebs, Is Death a True ‘Triple’ Threat?” In this tribute to full-blown dementia, David Montgomery tries to discern if celebrities really do die in threes. This one seems to be aimed at readers who eschew sexy-time tales, yet long to be inane all the same. For decades, we’ve been in thrall to this small, stupid mafia’s exceptionally low-IQ culture. They dragged us through it all during the 1990s, then started again in the summer of 2001, when the disappearance of Chandra Levy let them spend months reciting their favorite tales, in which Big Dems screw around with interns and might be murderers too. Remember! They only do it because they’re appalled by all the [select one] lying/hypocrisy/murder! But in all the years of their phony prurience, we don’t think we’ve ever seen a front page to match this one. With this page, a small, broken mafia leaves its scent. If you have access to a hard-copy Post, we suggest that you give it a look. Two women: We grew up watching My Little Margie, one of many I Love Lucy knock-offs in 1950s TV. In his obituary for Gale Storm, the program’s cheerful star, the Post’s Adam Bernstein shares a rare piece of gender-accuracy: BERNSTEIN (6/30/09): Always well-meaning but frequently daffy, Ms. Storm's energetic, enthusiastic Margie Albright lived in Manhattan with her widowed onscreen father and showed a gift for concocting kooky schemes to keep him from new romantic entanglements... The show, which ran until 1955 and lasted many decades in syndication, helped shape one of the stock characters of popular entertainment: the wacky woman, a fount of endearingly comic mistakes and misadventures. With I Love Lucy taking the lead, those early sitcoms heavily trafficked in that image of women. In these shows, women were wacky, daffy, misadventure-prone. Luckily, their mistakes were endearing. We’ll admit it—absent the “endearing” part, we thought of these Olbermann years as we read that passage. Has anyone but the creators of those sitcoms ever ridiculed women so? Olbermann has kept it up for years, helping define our “progressive” values. He has especially loved to mock young women. In one of his most ridiculous outings, he even ridiculed Kirsten Dunst for a perfectly reasonable statement, informing her, “You’re no Carl Sagan.” (He seemed to believe that he was.) Back to the Post. Thumbing further, we hit this morning’s op-ed page, where we encountered a remembrance of perhaps the most famous—and brilliant—young woman—girl—of the last century. “Anne Frank would have celebrated her 80th birthday this month,” film-maker George Stevens Jr. began. Who knows what that brilliant girl might have done if she’d been allowed to live her life? Near the end of his memoir, Stevens recalls his visit to her family’s famous hiding place. Anne Frank’s father took him there. It happened in those same 1950s STEVENS (6/30/09): We climbed the stairway until we were in the fourth-floor rooms where the families had hidden. Otto Frank described the day the Gestapo broke through the bookcase door that concealed the entrance. It was determined later that Gestapo Oberscharfuhrer Karl Silberbauer was the man in charge. He snatched Mr. Frank's briefcase and emptied the contents on the floor. He gathered up the silverware and a Hanukkah menorah and left behind papers and other contents as they herded the two families down the stairs. Anne's diary remained on the floor. He stole away with the silverware—and left the precious item behind. Or as the Roman matron Cornelia so famously said: “These are my jewels.” (Our high school Latin teacher would tell that old story with a strong sense of belief.) We don’t want to knock the late Gale Storm in any way, shape or form. But we were struck by the juxtaposition of these memoirs this morning, with their dueling images of the virtues of young women—girls. By the way, the New York Times seems unaware of the gender issues involved in those sitcoms. The Times tells a simpler story today. In the Times’ account, Gale Storm “made wholesome perkiness a defining element of television's golden age.” THE ARRANGEMENT OF CECI AND DANA: Ceci Connolly and Dana Milbank have both received web attention this week. It might be worth remembering how the two are connected. This takes us back to 1999—to a time when the world’s history was being changed. In March of that year, Gore began his informal campaigning for the White House. (Bradley was already on the trail. Bush would start campaigning in June. Clinton’s impeachment trial had just ended.) And Connolly began her deeply unfortunate, twenty-month run as the Washington Post’s Gore reporter. It became fairly clear, fairly fast, that something was badly wrong with her work. For us, this produced a brush with greatness. In early April 1999, we interviewed Connolly, for the full hour we think, while doing our weekly guest spot on a WMAL radio show. We’d scheduled Ceci because of her peculiar Washington Post magazine cover story, an 8000-word attack on Gore which came complete with four mocking visuals. The piece appeared on April 4, 1999. To read it, just click here The report, which dealt with Gore’s fund-raising, remains a museum-level, textbook case of disingenuous pseudo-reporting. (At the time, we didn’t know how bad the work really was. In fairness, we knew pretty well.) But as the year went along, it became clear that something was badly wrong with a great deal of Connolly’s “reporting.” Eventually, this led to the single most significant bit of bungled “reporting” in that fateful campaign. That was the completely accidental misquotation, by Connolly and Katharine Seelye, of something Gore said in New Hampshire about his work in the House of Representatives concerning the Love Canal toxic waste site. This completely accidental joint misquotation occurred on November 30, 1999; it rekindled the press corps’ GORE LIAR theme, which was withering on the vine at the time due to a lack of examples. After Connolly and Seelye came up with their completely accidental misquotation, the GORE LIAR theme revived, in a month-long frenzy, and hardened into stone. (Eventual standard paraphrase: Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal!) This theme drove the rest of the campaign coverage. In the end, it sent George Bush to the White House. It’s completely absurd—Rosen-level absurd—to pretend it didn’t. Love Canal transformed the coverage—hardened its tendencies into stone. But this was Ceci’s second score in just that one marvelous month. At the start of November, another silly theme had emerged—and it too burned up a month of press coverage: Naomi Wolf told Al Gore to wear earth tones! This grew from a front-page “news report” by Connolly. In it, she quoted Dick Morris “speculating” that this troubling thing might have occurred. As far as we know, no evidence ever surfaced to indicate that any such thing ever happened. But so what? Connolly’s insinuation swept through the press corps. On CNN, it was being reported as fact by that afternoon. And it produced that famous claim—another claim which remains iconic. In this format, it would be hard to capture all the nonsense produced by Connolly in 1999. By far, she was the most important—and most destructive—print reporter in that White House campaign. It’s hard to believe that any reporter ever did so much, in modern times, to change a White House campaign. Here’s the connection to Milbank: During 1999, Milbank was the top campaign reporter for the New Republic. The journal was owned by Marty Peretz, a long-time friend and admirer of Gore. If any journal was going to report on Connolly’s journalistic misconduct, you’d think it would have been the New Republic. But Milbank said nothing about her work. Nothing, all through the year. And then, sure enough! In January 2000, Milbank accepted a new and better job—at the Washington Post! He’d spent the entire year ignoring Connolly’s growing misconduct—even as he negotiated with her owners to get a new job for himself. Nor was Milbank alone in this conduct, which simply screamed of conflict-of-interest. Charles Lane, then the editor of the New Republic, took a brand-spanking new job with the Post at the same darn time! They’re both at the Washington Post to this day. Each fellow kept his trap shut about Connolly’s work—as he negotiated to get hired by her mighty newspaper. Connolly’s conduct was astounding all through that White House campaign. Equally astounding is the fact that she is now the Post’s lead reporter on such a major, seminal issue as the current health reform effort. It’s astounding—that someone could have done all the things she did in that campaign with nary a peep from the career liberal world. Ten years later, the career liberal world is still too full of craven cowards to utter a peep of retrospective protest. Or to worry about the fact that she’s covering health reform. But then, even now—with Obama the king and the GOP in retreat—you live inside a Potemkin political world. Two teams seem to compete on the field. They’re called the Republicans and the Democrats—but more often, they behave like the Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. Inside Washington, a career liberal world pretends to compete—but it mainly likes to gambol and play, writing amusements about sex pseudo-scandals. This world mainly pretends to compete. The fact that Connolly is back on the field with nary a scratch shows you the depth of its refusal to actually do so. Their names are Dionne, and Robinson—and Ezra Klein? They will never tell you what Ceci did. They have good jobs—and plan to keep them. They are very good team players—if you’re coaching the Washington Generals. (Regarding group agreements: Did you ever wonder why, fifteen years later, your side still has no serious frameworks with which to approach health reform? Did you ever wonder why everyone has agreed , for fifteen years, not to discuss European health care? Not to scream, in very loud voices, about the world’s most ridiculous set of facts? Everyone but Krugman, that is?) Right now, Obama is being allowed to put the economy and the financial world back together again. Eventually, the reconstruction will have occurred. The looting will then proceed anew; so will the use of power to keep the public from knowing about it. (Has Naomi Klein been back on Maddow?) Efforts will start to return the less liberal party to power. At that time, you’ll still think that two teams are competing. But the Dionnes and the Robinsons won’t be competing. They will politely keep their traps shut, as they did in 1999 and 2000 as the slanders rolled out over Gore. People, those are damn good jobs! Your “leaders” aren’t planning to give them up. And young career writers still want them. It’s astounding that Connolly walked away from Campaign 2000 with barely a scratch. In large part, that happened because career “liberals” have been standing in line to go to work for the Washington Post. No one in the “career liberal” world has ever wanted to tell the public about what she did. Ceci and Dana are both in the news. In truth, they go way back. In real time, across the pond: So you’ll understand how the system works, let’s recall what someone wrote in the Financial Times in the summer of 2000. Below, we’ll tell you who that person almost certainly was. What follows was part of an unsigned report called “Tale of two press corps.” In the summer of 2000, you had to go across the pond to learn the kinds of obvious facts presented in this accurate piece. (There is no link available.) Over here, the Milbanks, the Dionnes and the Al Hunts were pretending to be unaware of such obvious facts: FINANCIAL TIMES (8/17/00): [T]he Gore media, for all its experience, sometimes appears to step over the line in its pursuit of critical coverage. At the heart of the press corps are three reporters, known to their politically-incorrect colleagues as the "Spice Girls". The three are perhaps the most influential reporters on the Gore campaign, having covered the vice-president almost without break this year: Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post, Katharine Seelye of The New York Times and Sandra Sobieraj of the Associated Press. They can also be the most hostile to the campaign, doing little to hide their contempt for the candidate and his team. Let’s be clear: This assessment is vastly understated, especially when it comes to Connolly, the worst offender of the three writers named. Her hostility toward Gore had been quite clear for well over a year at this point. But people like Milbank wanted good jobs, and so they kept their big traps shut. People like Dionne wanted to keep the good jobs they already had. Richard Cohen? He was writing whole columns attacking Lieberman for things Bush had actually said. Yep! You had to journey across the pond to learn the truth in the summer of 2000. By the way, how big a semi-nut was Connolly at that time? This quick glimpse into ConnollyWorld appeared in that same report: FINANCIAL TIMES: Connolly expressed her feelings most dramatically on last month's plane trip to North Carolina where the Gores were taking their pre-convention vacation. To lighten the mood on board, the campaign had given reporters beach accessories including plastic water pistols. According to several witnesses, when Gore came back to chat with the press on his plane, Connolly put her arm around the vice-president's shoulder and held the gun to his head. It might have been a joke. But for the secret service on board, as well as the Gore campaign, there were no smiles. Good times! Meanwhile, here’s how Connolly handled the unwanted publicity, according to Susan Threadgill in the Washingtonian. Even though the publicity appeared across the pond, Ceci wasn’t having it: THREADGILL (11/1/00): Recently, The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly gave the Secret Service a bit of a heart attack on Air Force Two when she put her arm around the vice president's shoulder and held a plastic water pistol to his head. While Connolly claimed the incident was a joke, others saw it as a reflection of her well-known hostility to the Gore camp, according to the Financial Times. Connolly has denied any bias against Gore, but she apparently made no bones about her feelings about the Financial Times. An incensed Connolly reportedly gave the Times staff a tongue lashing for daring to write about the behavior of reporters covering the campaign and for breaking the unspoken rule among the press that keeps its own dirty laundry private. Cute. Now that a few years have passed, we recall being told, in December 1999, about another special event from ConnollyWorld—her accusation that the Gore campaign had been going through her luggage! As best we recall what we were told, the campaign seemed to think that she was maybe just a trifle nuts at this time. She was going through a rough divorce, we were told. We don’t know if any of what we were told was accurate. Our own tattle-tale: Who tattled on Ceci that way? Let’s recall who was covering the campaign for the Financial Times. That’s right! It was Our Own Richard Wolffe, who now stars on cable TV as Olbermann’s version of Fredo! Below, we’ll link you to Wolffe’s recent, rather sinister thoughts about the way journalism and business interact. Back then, Wolffe was more idealistic. You may remember him from the end of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO film, Journeys with George. Wolffe was one of the stars of the film; at the end, he lamented the divergent ways the press had covered Bush and Gore. When the film aired on HBO, Wayne Slater captured a few of his quotes in the Dallas Morning News. For the record, “over here” means “over here on the Bush plane:” SLATER (3/7/02): Journeys With George is a Rorschach test: You'll see what you want to see. George Bush the good guy or George Bush the goof. “The Gore press corps was all about how they didn't like him and they didn't trust him, and that kind of filtered through into their stories,” Mr. Wolffe of the Financial Times tells Alexandra. “Over here, you know, we were writing about trivial stuff because he charmed the pants off us.” There is a curious, Escherlike quality to the movie. The real becomes the unreal and then real again. Sure enough! Almost surely, that’s the guy who wrote the FT’s “Tale of two press corps!” And after that campaign ended, of course, Wolffe never said such important things again. He could have helped the public learn the truth—but that might have harmed his career. By 2002, he was working for Newsweek, which is of course owned by the Washington Post. Through Newsweek, he became an MSNBC star. (The entities have a corporate tie-in.) Could Our Own Richard Wolffe have gotten this big if he’d continued to tell the truth about the Washington Post’s campaign coverage? One last sad example of the way this system seems to work: In the summer of 2000, excitement was spreading! In part thanks to the Financial Times, word had spilled that other reporters were angry at Connolly/Seelye/Sobieraj—thought their “reporting” was crap. And at Brill’s Content, a major media magazine, Seth Mnookin was on the case! He interviewed us about Connolly and Seelye’s reporting. (We’ve never quite understood how Sobieraj got thrown in this stew.) In the process, we forwarded him to a major reporter who had told us, earlier that year, that he thought their “reporting” was crap. But uh-oh! When Mnookin’s piece appeared in early September, he had no earthly idea why Connolly and Seelye had been criticized—unless it was because their critics were sexist! Sure, they got Love Canal wrong, he acknowledged. But he couldn’t find squat beyond that! Mnookin suggested the critics were sexist. And by complete and total coincidence, he took a new, better job in 2002. He took that new, better job with Newsweek—which is owned by the Washington Post! Could he ever have gotten that job if he’d been more frank about Ceci? We have no idea. We would guess that many young career writers have no plans to find out. Brill’s Content no longer exists. We’ll further guess that Steven Brill learned a lesson in this whole process: You can’t get young career writers to tell the truth about possible future employers. To his credit, Our Own Richard Wolffe told the truth in the Financial Times—and on the Bush plane, in Pelosi’s filmSince then, all has been silent. But then, the gentleman made his bones at Newsweek. It’s owned by the Washington Post. At any rate, Connolly was very much the “alpha female” in the pack which chased Gore down for twenty months. Ten years later, she is back, covering a very important issue. We do not allege that she has an agenda in her coverage of health reform. (She may, of course; we have no idea.) But the compliant hacks of the career liberal world have never uttered the tiniest peep about any of this world-changing history. You aren’t allowed to know such things. Darlings! Jobs are at stake! And by the way—they never will! They can read the name on the front of their shirts. These superstars play for the Washington Generals. Some things, they’re allowed to say. Other things? Not so much. Summarizing: They all ended up at Newsweek or the Post: Milbank Lane Mnookin Wolffe Ezra Klein And that’s just the starting five! Needless to say, we aren’t discussing the people who want to play Hardball. They have to stifle too. Darlings! Jobs are at stake! Digby captured Wolffe: These days, Our Own Richard Wolffe has become a slightly more hardened player. Earlier this month, Digby nearly fell on the fainting couch herself! But then, she had every right. You know what to do—just click here

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• 29 Jun 2009 10:12

  BLUE-STATE BLOW-HARDS! At the Times, they love to hunt those legions of red-state hypocrites: MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2009 Information stops at the water’s edge: Your society isn’t likely to be here long, for reasons Paul Krugman explains in this morning’s column. Krugman describes an incident from this weekend’s global warming debate. In this incident, Republicans applauded a fellow House member who called climate change a “hoax.” We agree with Krugman on one thing—that moment was revealing, important. But on balance, we don’t necessarily agree with his assessment of motive: KRUGMAN (6/29/09): [Y]ou didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it—and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial. Were those applauding House members really “interested in the truth?” For ourselves, we’d guess they believe that warming’s a hoax; they think that is the truth. We’d simply say that their conduct—their loud, ongoing state of denial—is a largely pre-rational phenomenon. But then, we see similar non-rational conduct in many current debates—and not just from folk on the right. Consider two columns in Sunday’s Washington Post. They were written by George Will, a man of the right, and Ruth Marcus, a woman of the center left. Each column pondered the high cost of American health care. Will began with bluster and thunder. “Most Americans do want different health care,” the thundering giant announced. “They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices.” Will’s meaning was soon made clear—Americans want the advantages of modern health care at the price tag of its Model T predecessor. In this passage, a thundering giant announces why this desire is so dumb, so absurd WILL (6/28/09): The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey writing in the American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed—55 percent. But the health-care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care—and symphonies, universities, museums, etc. It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health-care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys. Spending on health care has increased, Will condescends, because health care has gotten “increasingly competent.” We have amazing stuff now—MRIs, CAT scans, all the rest! This just isn’t your father’s health care. If you think you can get it at bargain prices, you’re just a big dumb silly dope. Of course, they have CAT scans in Europe too. And in the year of Our Lord 2003, those European nations (and Japan) recorded per capita health care spending which went something like this: United States: $5711 Denmark: $2743 France: $3048 Germany: $2983 Italy: $2314 Japan: $2249 United Kingdom: $2317 Just like Michael Kinsley on Friday, Will forgot to mention a salient fact. Other nations with “increasingly competent” health care spend half as much as we do! On Friday, Kinsley somehow knew he mustn’t mention that fact, in his own column about health care costs. On Sunday, Will knew he mustn’t speak too—but then again, so did Ruth Marcus! In that same newspaper, Marcus was crazily tearing her hair, trying to figure out how we can lower our overall spending on health care. By the end of her piece, she had wandered off into the weeds—into the land of ten percent savings on minor parts of our overall system: MARCUS (6/28/09): John Holahan and Linda Blumberg of the Urban Institute, thoughtful advocates of a public option, have a new paper outlining a public plan that would pay providers either 10 or 20 percent more than Medicare rates; by contrast, private insurers now pay about 30 percent more. They argue that private insurance would not "be eradicated" under this approach—the strongest and most efficient private insurers would survive, they say—but would lower costs to compete. Consequently, the government would have to pay less in planned subsidies to help lower-income Americans obtain insurance, saving an estimated $224 billion over 10 years if prices were 20 percent more than Medicare rates and almost $400 billion if prices were at 10 percent above the Medicare level. In the public debates of your dying society, “thoughtful advocates” look for ways to save ten percent on relatively minor parts of our system. And columnists of the left, right and center all agree to engage in a basic denial: They agree they will never mention the fact that we spend 100 percent more, per capita, than our friends across the pond. It’s a matter of Hard Pundit Law. That basic fact cannot be stated—and everyone agrees to play along. As in climate change, so in health care—except a bit more so. Your public debate takes place in a climate of airbrushing—of almost complete denial. Information stops at the water’s edge when to comes to our health care discussions. When it comes to climate change, some major players are in denial. But when it comes to health care spending, denial is practiced by one and all—with a few very rare exceptions. Krugman himself discussed those remarkable spending figures in a series of columns in 2005, for example. He went there again in 2007, discussing Michael Moore’s Sicko. By now though, even he sees “denial” in the climate debate. Not in the health care discussion. Sorry. Modern societies can’t function this way. Your society has already started to die because of the non-rational conduct in which its elites have all agreed to engage. You got handed the last eight years in part because your liberal “leaders” practiced denial all through the 1990s, then all through the twenty-month War Against Gore. But so what? Even now, Professor Rosen remains in denial about this obvious part of our history. Glenn Greenwald stares into air and seems to agree while Jay smokes dope and blathers. By now, our elites are almost completely non-rational. Climate change is a good example. Health spending may be the best. Denial and Inhofe: James Inhofe is a senator, not a mere House member. He has been calling climate change a “hoax” since at least 2003. We know this in part because of Krugman, who has railed against this remarkable fact in at least six different columns. In 2006, one column was headlined, “Who’s Crazy Now?” It started like this: KRUGMAN (5/8/06): Who’s Crazy Now? Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right. For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that ''man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Weird though, ain’t it? Using Nexis, we can find only one glancing reference to Inhofe’s statements in any New York Times editorial. We find no sign that the Times has ever done a news report on Inhofe’s statements—or on his substantial influence. Among modern elites, denial is quite widely found, along with its lover, avoidance. BLUE-STATE BLOW-HARDS: Is America dying? It’s hard to be sure. But we’re clearly a land of brainless ciphers—and over the course of the past eight years, we have paid a very high price for that powerful dumbness. A modern society can’t run on dumb—and we are now dumb to the core. More specifically, our modern elites are dumb to the core. Indeed, this may be the only fact a person can now expect to learn from reading the New York Times. Just consider the nonsense you got handed this weekend from that paper’s silly, daft columnists—blather which the paper’s readers e-mailed around at high rates. Gail Collins grabbed our attention first, diddling herself about Mark Sanford’s love ways. By paragraph 3, the empty vessel was ready to state her premise: COLLINS (6/27/09): Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving American politicians and Argentine women. Yay! An excuse to talk about Fanne Foxe, “the Argentine Firecracker!” Collins, of course, burst on the scene with her fatuous book, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics. She’s been wasting our time—and rotting our souls—with her gossip obsessions ever since. (We Irish! And Collins, nee Gleason, didn’t even grow up on the East Coast!) Then too, we had Lady Dowd, typing some Goofus-and-Gallant-style piffle about two characters, Mark and Marco. In Dowd’s world, Sanford has made the world’s gravest mistake. He has agreed to have hot, steamy sex with someone who isn’t Maureen Dowd. (Others have paid the price for this crime over the past fifteen years.) But for sheer unvarnished serial dumbness, Charles Blow has been emerging as a major Times leader. He may have enhanced his leadership role with his own treatment of Sanford’s crimes—in which he found three ways to assert that red-state voters as a group are just big screaming hypocrites. On Saturday, Blow opened his column with the already hackneyed “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” jibe. (We’re all Josh Marshall now.) After that, he quoted from Sanford’s personal e-mails, diddling himself as he went. With these moves accomplished in paragraph 1, he began to lie in our faces. “I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster,” the gentleman wrote. Yeah. Sure: BLOW (6/27/09): I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster. People make mistakes. The flesh is weak, the heart disobedient and marriages hard. According to the General Social Survey, about 10 percent of married people admit that they have cheated on their spouses. And, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in March last year, 54 percent of Americans say that they know someone who has been unfaithful. 'Twas ever thus. At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another. Sure. Is patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels? Over on the pseudo-left, the last refuge is the one Blow has chosen. We liberals don’t care about the sex stuff at all! It’s the hypocrisy that drives us wild! If you believe that, we’ve got a bridge to the Salem Witch Trials we might be willing to sell you. (For the record, Republicans didn’t care about the sex either. It was the lying which made them so mad!) Let’s review: Blow is only discussing this matter because he hates the hypocrisy. (This no doubt explains why he quoted those e-mails so fast.) As a surprise, he starts his discussion of this problem with something which borders on cogency—with an account of Sanford’s alleged hypocrisy. We wouldn’t put it this way ourselves. But at least it makes modest sense: BLOW: Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton's behavior ''reprehensible'' and said, ''I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally'' to resign. ''I come from the business side. ... If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he'd be gone.'' Remember that Mr. Sanford? Surprise! This makes a dollop of sense. Sanford told Clinton to do one thing—and now, in his own case, he’s doing another! We wouldn’t waste much time on this ourselves. But at least it makes modest sense. But you know Blow! He isn’t content to say Sanford has been hypocritical, which at least makes modest sense. As is standard at the Times, the fellow is eager to lower the boom on everyone in the other tribe. “[T]his kind of hypocrisy isn't confined to the politicians,” he grandly finds as he continues. “It permeates the electorate.” With that, Blow starts showing us how hypocritical the whole red-state electorate is. Unfortunately, this is the New York Times. It isn’t clear that Blow even knows what “hypocrisy” means: BLOW (continuing directly): And this kind of hypocrisy isn't confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can't keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006. Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates. For now, we’ll skip his third example—a supremely dumb alleged example which thrilled web liberals a few months back. Let’s stop for a basic question: Does Blow even know what “hypocrisy” means? In all candor, it’s hard to see how either of these first two examples represents a case of same. According to Blow, it’s hypocritical when someone who opposes same-sex marriage gets divorced him- or herself. Blow fails to note that many blue-state Democratic pols oppose gay marriage and have gotten divorced. That to the side, the pundit is eager to say that this type of hypocrisy “permeates” the red-state electorate. For ourselves, we don’t quite see how this combination constitutes an act of “hypocrisy” at all. But on the modern pseudo-left, it’s fun to call the other tribe hypocrites, a point Blow makes a bit more clear as his “examples” roll on. (Remember: Except for all the hypocrisy, Blow wouldn’t waste his time discussing this at all.) In Blow’s second example, red-states voters are supposed to be hypocrites when they fail to adopt the type of sex education Blow himself favors. Supposedly, their “hypocrisy” can be seen when Blow notes that red-state teens give birth more often than blue-staters. Again, we have no idea why this is supposed to constitute “hypocrisy”—as opposed to, let’s say, bad judgment about the best type of sex education. But for the record, red-state teens seem to have more babies because they have fewer abortions, not because they get pregnant more often. In the very data to which Blow links, Guttmacher shows that “those red states” account for only five of the ten states with the highest teen pregnancy rates. (Just click here. Click ahead to page 12.) Blow seems to have picked-and-chosen his data set here. After all, his graphic would have looked pretty weak if five of the ten states it featured were blue. Or were those red-staters also being “hypocritical” when they decided against abortion? By eternal laws of the clan, we’ll guess: Of course they were! (By eternal laws of the clan, the other side always lacks character.) Blow’s third “example” is so dumb it could only appear in the Times. What newspaper except Gotham’s best would let its big stars “reason” this way? This is his third demonstration of the way hypocrisy “permeates” the red-state electorate: BLOW (continuing directly): And, a study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that was conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor of business at Harvard Business School and published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ” They could avoid this hypocrisy by focusing more on what happens in their own bedrooms and avoiding the trap of judging what goes on in everyone else’s. Are there some people in the red states who profess those “old-fashioned values” while subscribing to online pornography sites? Presumably, yes—there are. If you want to call them hypocrites—Blow does!—you can take your pleasure. But how many people subscribe to these sites at all? In the red states, how many such people profess those values? Blow doesn’t have the slightest idea. Does this act of hypocrisy “permeate” the red-state electorate? Duh. We suspect we can guess the answer. Let’s face it. Like others at his silly newspaper, Blow enjoys discussing the way hypocrisy “permeates” the other tribe. (This matches the way pseudo-conservatives talked about immoral blue-staters back in the 1990s.) Meanwhile, the pundit is dumb beyond belief. But that’s why he was asked to join this page! Dowd and Collins were already there, crying for reinforcements. Final point: Frank Rich enjoys name-calling red-staters too. It’s fairly clear that this was part of the reason he kept beating on Gore during Campaign 2000. He kept insisting that Bush and Gore were peas in a pod—just a pair of big fake phonies. As late as 2006, he was still complaining about the fact that Gore owned a rifle when he was a child. When Gore mentioned that fact in his Oscar-winning film, he was appealing to red-state gun nuts, preparatory to his upcoming White House campaign! It showed what a big fake Gore is! When it came to Gore’s religion and guns, Rich was the biggest gun nut of all. Bush and Gore were just alike, he kept grandly asserting. Are you happy with how that turned out? Impressed with the mental firepower of high-ranking “liberal” “elites?”

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• 27 Jun 2009 14:49

  AUGMENTING FOSER! We’re big fans of Jamison Foser. We augment his recent time-line: SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2009 Augmenting Foser: In these parts, we’re big fans of Jamison Foser—and of his running-mate, Eric Boehlert. We don’t necessarily agree with every word Foser says. But his most recent column deserves to be read—and we think his facts deserve a small bit of augmentation. Foser critiques a recent statement by the frequently hapless Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe. Brzezinski is a reliable repository for Standardized Press Corps Conventional Wisdom. In his current column, Foser challenges her recent suggestion that the media tend to go harder on Republicans who have sex scandals. It’s hard to measure such matters, of course. As always, we recommend Foser’s assessment. But quickly, Foser cited one of the obvious counter-examples FOSER (6/26/09): Brzezinski's claim of a double standard in which the media make a bigger deal out of the affairs of Republican politicians than Democrats is pure bunk and cannot be allowed to go undisputed. Nobody would expect an affair involving a senator or governor or even a speaker of the House to garner as much attention as one involving a sitting president. But nobody who was paying attention in 1998 can plausibly claim that the media give Democrats a pass. The feeding frenzy set off by the Lewinsky story that January is simply unmatched in history. It was the dominant topic in newspapers, on evening news broadcasts, and on cable news every day for a year. Nothing has come close to the sustained level of wall-to-wall media coverage the Lewinsky story was given. Not the three presidential elections that have happened since, not the war in Iraq—nothing. Media coverage of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2000 recount arguably came close to that of Lewinsky in terms of intensity, but for a much shorter period of time. Why do we like Foser’s work so much? Because he routinely offers sensible comments which undercut his own tribal preference. (“Nobody would expect an affair involving a senator or governor or even a speaker of the House to garner as much attention as one involving a sitting president.”) But it’s true: The Lewinsky story set off a stunning press corps frenzy—one which lasted longer than the year to which he sensibly refers. Today, we want to extend that initial time-line a bit. (Foser himself notes the press corps’ lingering obsession with Miss Lewinsky.) In that time-line, he says the Monica frenzy “was the dominant topic in newspapers, on evening news broadcasts, and on cable news every day for a year.” That’s true. But we’d add to that year. The Lewinsky story broke into public view in January 1998. It was indeed the press corps’ dominant story over the next year. In fact, Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was held in February 1999. As such, the basic season of this frenzy ran about thirteen months. But the corps’ Big Love for Monica wasn’t about to end there. In the past year or so, we’ve had occasion to review the state of the mainstream press in mid-June 1999. Within a four-day span that month, George Bush flew to Iowa, where he announced he would run for the White House. Al Gore gave his formal announcement speech four days later. Bush announced on June 12; Gore on June 16. What was happening in the press at that time? It was still Quite Massively Monica. Fifteen months had passed since this story began. Ten months had passed since President Clinton admitted to an improper affair. Four months had passed since his impeachment trial ended. But even now, in mid-June 1999, the national “press corps” was all a-tingle over this thrilling matter. Indeed: As late as June 1999, many of Washington’s major journalists seemed able to focus on little else. In the week before Gore made his launch, the American war in Kosovo reached a sudden, favorable end. But the Lewinsky matter remained the corps’ focus at the time of Bush and Gore’s announcements. Bush and Gore sketched plans for the future. But the corps dreamed of The Big She. The national press corps hadn’t “moved on” as Bush and Gore announced their intentions. Just consider the nation’s front pages on the weekend before Gore announced. On Sunday, June 13, the New York Times ran a front-page report about Bush’s trip to Iowa. But on that same front page, the Times ran a report about special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who had now been investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton for the better part of five years. “Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater prosecutor, will not seek indictments of President Clinton or Hillary Rodham Clinton but has tentatively decided to issue a final report about their behavior,” the paper reported, citing unnamed “associates of Starr.” There was more, some of which was a bit slippery. “The report, which could land in the middle of Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign, might be ‘blistering’ in its descriptions of her actions, one Starr associate said.” At any rate, Candidate Bush was on the front page this day—and so was Clinton’s prosecutor. But then, Starr was everywhere this weekend as the press corps continued reporting on various alleged Clinton scandals. Indeed, he appeared that Sunday on Fox News Sunday, sadly announcing that, four months post-impeachment, he’d be forced to continue his probes of the Clintons. Hours after Starr’s appearance, the AP reported his thoughts to the world. “Prosecutor Kenneth Starr said Sunday he has no choice but to keep investigating the Clintons,” the AP said, “a course that could collide with the 2000 presidential election campaign and a possible Senate run by the first lady.” The damage this focus could do to Gore escaped the AP’s notice this day. Again: Starr’s investigations had now lasted almost five years. On Monday, through the AP’s report, Starr moved from the Times’ front page to newspapers across the country. Gore made his announcement speech two days later. Alleged scandal still filled the air. Just consider the Washington Post, whose own front page was still moving with Monica. On Sunday, June 13, a news report captured the sunny high spirits involved in Bush’s Iowa launch. But this upbeat report shared the front page with the latest dollop of Clinton/Lewinsky. On that same day, the Post began a three-part serialization of Bob Woodward’s new book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate. Woodward’s book studied the ways a “scandal culture” had affected five American presidents in the decades following Nixon. But more than half of Woodward’s new book would focus on Clinton, the Post now reported. And all three excerpts on the Post’s front page involved Clinton/Lewinsky. Nothing else. On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings, Monica starred on the Post’s front page. Gore gave his speech the next day. Then too, there was the press corps’ embarrassing, childish conduct during Gore’s actual launch. It was fifteen months since the story began, four months since impeachment ended. But when Gore sat for interviews that week, he was routinely asked to discuss Bill and Monica—and little or nothing else. In the Post, Howard Kurtz reported the corps’ odd focus. In our view, Kurtz was a tad too kind to the press on this subject. But note what Simon said: KURTZ (6/25/99): The tone of the early interviews is revealing. While the vice president has stressed specifics, such as improving education and health care for the elderly and curbing suburban sprawl, the media have pursued other subjects. On ABC's "20/20," Diane Sawyer asked about the perception of Gore as boring, whether Hillary Rodham Clinton was "bigfooting" him by running for the Senate, and about his defense of the president during the impeachment process. Gore said that Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky was "inexcusable.” CBS's Bob Schieffer also pressed the vice president about backing his boss, saying at one point: "But he turned out to be a liar." NBC's Claire Shipman asked: "Are you worried that you will pay the ultimate price for Bill Clinton's impeachment?" Roger Simon, chief political writer for U.S. News & World Report, defended the focus on Lewinsky: "It's still the story that has shaped our time. We want to hear him say what a terrible reprobate the president was, while defending his record. We're going to make him jump through the hoops. I don't think there's anything wrong with that." In fact, Schieffer asked about nothing but Clinton/Lewinsky in the interview segments he aired. (He interrupted Gore’s very first answer to declare Clinton a liar.) Sawyer’s inane, repetitive questions on the same subject were an embarrassment to the human race. And sure enough, there was Simon, committing a classic “Washington gaffe”—by unwisely telling the truth about something. Clinton/Lewinsky was “the story that has shaped our time,” the flush-cheeked fellow excitedly said. And then, he said a remarkable thing. He and his colleagues were “going to make [Gore] jump through the hoops” until he’d insulted President Clinton in the manner they deemed sufficient. They were going to punish Gore till he said what they wanted to hear. One other point must be mentioned here. That involves the groaning conduct of the Post’s Ceci Connolly. By the time of his announcement, Gore had criticized Clinton’s conduct with Lewinsky for nine solid months. Over and over, he had said the same things: The president’s conduct had been “inexcusable,” “indefensible”—“terribly wrong.” (Clinton himself had said similar things. So had many Big Democrats.) But so what? Over and over, reporters kept asking Gore the same questions, making him repeat the same comments. Despite this, the usual gang of stooges and hacks came up with a good idea this week. When Gore repeated these statements to Sawyer, they began to pretend that the slippery fellow had just flip-flopped about Clinton’s conduct! They began to insist that the slick, slippery Gore had just said these things “for the first time.” Poor Ceci! She’d endlessly reported Gore’s earlier comments, dating back to September 1998! But membership in this high cohort means Always Repeating The Approved Standard Story. And so, she knew what she had to do. She had to imply that Gore had flipped, without ever quite saying so. Connolly was slick—and wonderfully skilled. In the evolving formulations shown below, she implies that Gore had just criticized Clinton for the first time, without ever quite saying that. (Warning! She came damn close!) Indeed, by her second and third formulations, she had figured out how to use the explicit phrase, “for the first time,” while still saying things which were technically accurate. By June 27, she and John Harris were even pretending that there was something “stunning” about Gore’s comments that week—comments she had routinely reported over the prior nine months: CONNOLLY (6/16/99): Gore begins his 2000 marathon carrying Clinton baggage. Whatever private misgivings he may have had about the president's personal conduct, he soldiered loyally in public. Most famously, on Dec. 19, the day Clinton was impeached, Gore appeared at a South Lawn pep rally to say the vote "does a great disservice to a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents." Now, however, Gore is blunt in his criticism of the president's affair: "I want you to understand that there shouldn't be any mystery," he told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an interview to air on "20/20" tonight. "I thought it was awful, I thought it was inexcusable. But I made a commitment to serve this country as vice president." CONNOLLY (6/17/99): Gore mentioned Clinton by name only twice in his speech—in reference to the economy and Kosovo. In recent days, Gore has had harsh words about the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal and blunt talk about personal responsibility. In interviews with Tennessee reporters, Gore for the first time acknowledged he was “upset” by Clinton's illicit affair with the former White House intern. Referring to "that awful year we went through," he said, "I felt what the president did, especially as a parent, was inexcusable.” HARRIS AND CONNOLLY (6/27/99): Gore's announcement speech was laced with references to morality and personal values, which aides acknowledged were meant to draw an implicit contrast with Clinton. His most stunning remarks, however, came in conversations with Tennessee reporters the night before his formal announcement. In those interviews, Gore for the first time acknowledged he was "upset" by the scandal and the "wasted time" of the year-long controversy. Referring to "that awful year we went through," he said: "I felt what the president did, especially as a parent, was inexcusable." Ceci was slick. “Now, however, Gore is blunt in his criticism of the president's affair,” she wrote on June 16—as she repeated the very remarks she’d reported for nine solid months at that point. On June 17, she got even slicker—and what she wrote was still technically accurate! It was true—Gore had used the word “upset” for the first time when he spoke with those Tennessee reporters. In this slick and slippery way, Ceci slithered in line with the flagrant misstatements now being made by her colleagues. Monica was the woman they loved—the only woman they ever could care for. Even now, in their sixteenth month, they kept squeezing this perfect garbage through their loins and out onto the land. Happening that same week: During that same week, the “press corps” was inventing the claim that Hillary Clinton lied about the Cubs and the Yankees. Almost surely, their judgment was wrong—but their denunciations were savage (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/16/08). This too was part of the howling storm through which Gore launched his formal campaign. And since you asked, this is of course the way Bush reached the White House. The only woman they’ll ever love: She’s the only woman they’ll ever love! Just note how quickly Chief Dunce Milbank mentioned her name in yesterday’s “Sketch. ”(Sorry. You’ll have to read to paragraph 6. Lovers don’t like to be obvious.)

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• 26 Jun 2009 12:20

  EZRA SI, FROOMKIN NO! Ezra Klein obeyed a great rule. Froomkin never did: FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009 Kinsley rations the data: Is human life what Homer imagined—just a practical joke of the gods? Michael Kinsley’s column today raises that age-old question. Kinsley starts with a very good question: Can we make American health care less costly? As he starts, he seems to say yes. Yes, we actually can KINSLEY (6/26/09): The Obama administration believes that health care can be made cheaper without any reduction in quality. It has evidence to back this up. According to the famous Dartmouth studies, health care costs two or three times as much per person in some places in America as it does in others, with no measurable difference in results. Atul Gawande's deservedly admired recent essay in the New Yorker makes a similar point. So in theory it's easy: Just figure out how the cheap places do it and apply this knowledge to bring down the cost in the pricier places. But quickly, Kinsley moves to a rather odd place—a rather odd place for a liberal/progressive, which is the role in which he’s still cast in our alleged public discourse. Simply put, Kinsley says “rationing” as much as he can; he says “rationing” over and over. (Headline: “Health Care Faces the ‘R’ Word.”) And he doesn’t make much sense when he does—especially for a liberal/progressive who’s supposed to be very smart. Before long, the columnist—or the toy of the gods—is suggesting that, under Obama’s reforms, wealthy people may be barred from buying the health care they want: KINSLEY: It may seem absurd to worry about whether wealthy or well-insured people get every last test and exotic or speculative treatment when millions of Americans have no health insurance and millions more have gaping holes in their coverage. But the well-insured happen to include virtually all the people making the key decisions about health-care reform—members of Congress and their staffs, the White House staff, Washington journalists, and so on. These people's fears that they would lose the right to "choose my own doctor" (code for getting treatment with all the bells and whistles) helped kill Hillary Clinton's attempt to reform health care in the early 1990s. Fear of rationing could kill Obamacare for the same reason. But hold on! Does “Obamacare,” in any way, mean that wealthy people—those Washington journalists—would be barred from “getting treatment with all the bells and whistles?” Kinsley never says it does—but then, he never says it doesn’t! Like a tool of some corporate god, he simply spreads this insinuation through this morning’s column. By the time he’s done, he’s even citing that rationing blather from last week’s New York Times. And he’s quoting Mickey Kaus with a true-but-irrelevant thought: KINSLEY: David Leonhardt of the New York Times recently noted that spending so much on health care squeezes out spending on other things that we might prefer, and that is a form of rationing. On the other hand, the blogger Mickey Kaus argues that it makes perfect sense for a society growing richer (as ours soon will be again, we hope) to spend a growing share of that wealth on improving our health and longevity. Leonhardt’s right! That really is a form of rationing—in much the way a planet like Mars is really a form of a golf ball. (Everything’s a form of everything—if we just stretch the language enough.) And Kinsley approvingly cites Kaus’ picture, in which our society decides to spend more for its health care. But it’s funny, ain’t it? In the course of all this bullshit, Kinsley never quite mentions this: United States: $5711 Denmark: $2743 France: $3048 Germany: $2983 Italy: $2314 Japan: $2249 United Kingdom: $2317 That’s how much money a bunch of developed nations spent per person on health care in 2003. For additional numbers, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/18/09 Funny, ain’t it? Kinsley is asking if the United States could possibly spend less money on health care. He mentioned those “famous Dartmouth studies”—studies which involve health care costs in this country alone. But he forgot to mention these remarkable figures from those foreign lands! Is your life a joke of the gods? That’s what Homer thought. Kinsley of course is no average bright boy. More than a decade ago, he was purchased by Bill Gates and relocated to Seattle. This was at the time when Gates was deciding, for purely philanthropical reasons, to get involved in the news business. He hired Kinsley to edit Slate (AKA, the Washington Post West). He teamed with Jack Welch to invent MSNBC—“news” as the billionaires see it. Today, Kinsley is still cast as the very-smart liberal in the drama we describe as a “national discourse.” But it’s weird, ain’t it? When he writes a column on health care costs, he keeps saying rationing/rationing/rationing; he even suggests that “Obamacare” will somehow keep wealthy people from purchasing upper-end health care. And sure enough! He forgets to mention those remarkable international numbers—numbers which always seem to disappear from our “mainstream” health care debate. Looking at those remarkable numbers, any damn fool would wonder where all those extra dollars are going. Any damn fool would start to think this: Of course we can do this for less! Alas! It seems to be much as we’ve told you: We aren’t allowed to think about those remarkable numbers here in this country. Our lives may not be a joke of the gods. Increasingly, though, it seems that our lives are a practical joke of the bosses. Krugman posts the basics: “Bottom line: this is the most important domestic policy issue we face.” So wrote Paul Krugman, in this post from last Sunday, referring to health care reform. We assume the truth of that assessment. For that reason, we’ve been more struck each passing day by the “managed” nature of our public discussion of health care. How do other countries do it? What really goes on in England or France when it comes to health care? In Sicko, Michael Moore offered a funny, intriguing introduction to this fundamental question. We thought it was as good an “opening argument” as we’ve seen, on any question. And of course, that’s right where the matter died. (Except for Sanjay Gupta’s embarrassing attempt to contradict factual statements by Moore.) We’ve never see a big newspaper or a major journal offer an expert view of such questions. Our current attempts at health care reform seem to be hopelessly complex. How have they done it in other countries—countries which spend much less than we do, but seem to have better outcomes? In this country, you can’t find out! To all appearances, we have a thoroughly “managed” discussion. Consider this contrast, for instance: The American press has no general instinct against international comparisons. In international educational assessments, the United States tends to score around the middle among developed nations. But these comparisons are constantly hyped in the press. Typically, journalists are quite upset that we don’t rank right at the top. Compare that to the treatment of international comparisons concerning health care: When it comes to health care costs, the US is the absolute, off-the-charts, worst-in-show. And yet, those thoroughly remarkable international comparisons are constantly ignored in the press. No one asks why our costs are so high—or even shows the public the numbers. No one profiles other countries, explaining how they manage to run their systems at half the cost. By the force of some invisible hand, you are simply not allowed to think about such questions. Two things seem remarkable here: First, the fact that our discourse can be so thoroughly “managed.” Second, the fact that no one seems to notice. Back to Krugman. We’ve never quite understood what lies behind the claim that countries like Italy and France have better health care systems than ours. (As the World Health Organization judged in 2000, for example.) In Sunday’s post, Krugman seemed to say that these other countries don’t really have better health outcomes. He seems to say their health outcomes are similar to ours—at roughly half the cost: KRUGMAN (6/21/09): Not many serious advocates of reform use the life expectancy differences to argue that health care is clearly better in other advanced countries than it is in the United States; when it comes to care, the general assessment seems to be that it’s comparable, with no advanced country having a clear advantage. The reform argument actually goes like this: Every other advanced country has universal coverage, protecting its citizens from the financial risks of uninsurance as well as ensuring that everyone gets basic care. They do this while spending far less on health care than we do. Yet they don’t seem to do worse in overall health results. “When it comes to care, the general assessment seems to be that...no advanced country ha[s] a clear advantage.” Other countries “don’t seem to do worse [than the U.S. does] in overall health results.” (The other countries all have full coverage, of course. That’s different from overall outcomes.) Is that the general assessment? Our outcomes are similar to those of the Euro tigers—but we’re spending twice as much? Amazingly, we don’t really know. The blackout on discussing this issue has long been quite pervasive. (Krugman has been an exception, of course.) Final note: We understand why pols might defer to industry. Why do big newspapers clam? Well, not quite. No one has ever displayed as much skill at misleading us rubes as Connolly did in Campaign 2000, during the twenty months when she covered Gore for the Washington Post. No one has ever been quite so skilled. But on Tuesday night, Connolly might have said, “Hey—not bad!” If she watched Our Own Rhodes Scholar offer some stage-managed bull-roar. The question: Had Obama toughened his rhetoric toward Iran at that day’s press conference? Everyone was saying he had—everyone but Obama himself, and Our Own Rhodes Scholar. She played tape of Obama giving “rhetorical wedgies” to a pair of reporters (Todd and Garrett). Then, she stated her premise: MADDOW (6/23/09): Wow! The president at his press conference today giving rhetorical wedgies to reporters who asked what he plainly thought were ill-informed or off-base questions about his position on Iran. In addition to the questions on Iran, the president led today’s press conference with a lengthy statement about the uprising in Iran that didn’t necessarily go further than anything he had said previously. But it did inexplicably, nevertheless, earn him headlines and questions from reporters that implied that he had gone significantly further. It was inexplicable, Our Scholar said. Reporters implied that Obama had gone significantly further than before—even though his opening statement “didn’t necessarily go further than anything he had said previously.” Didn’t necessarily go further.That’s slick, Ceci might well have said. At any rate, Our Own Rhodes Scholar now began to prove her point. She played tape of what Obama had said. She then said little had changed: MADDOW (continuing directly): Here’s some of what he said today: OBAMA (): I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran`s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place. The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, they must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people. MADDOW: That was a statement being billed everywhere as a dramatic escalation of the president’s stance on Iran. Except, when you look back at his previous statements, he was saying pretty much the same thing even more than a week ago. Correction: That was some of what Obama had said. Pretty slick, Ceci might have said. Too funny! That was indeed just some of what Obama had said that morning. In fact, those were the second and seventh paragraphs of the president’s opening statement. But uh-oh! The alleged escalation of Obama’s language had largely occurred in his first paragraph! This is the actual way he opened that morning’s press conference. The highlighted paragraph represents the start of his prepared statement: OBAMA (6/23/09): Hello, everybody. Good afternoon, everybody. Today I want to start by addressing three issues, and then I'll take your questions. First, I'd like to say a few words about the situation in Iran: The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost. I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran's affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place. Obama’s alleged escalation had largely occurred in that highlighted paragraph. He said the United States was “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s conduct in recent days. He said the United States “strongly condemned such unjust actions.” Did Obama escalate? We’d say that he did—and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have. But whatever your own judgment might be, the alleged escalation largely came in the opening paragraph of his prepared statement. Result? Our Own Rhodes Scholar omitted that paragraph when she showed what Obama had said! She fed us rubes his second paragraph—then played tape of earlier statements where he’d said similar things. The press corps’ judgment was “inexplicable,” she said. And sure enough! By the time she finished her air-brushing, her statement was pretty much true. Ceci would have known what to do—but then, so did Our Own Rhodes Scholar! In our view, this sort of thing often occurs at the “news” network GE has built. One distinction: It’s clear that Connolly typically worked from design. We’ll guess that Maddow’s presentation might largely represent inept staff work. Remember: The brains behind this channel, Bill Wolff, got his preparation running sports programs for Fox. To watch this segment, just click this. For the full transcript, EZRA SI, FROOMKIN NO: Our analysts cried and covered their eyes as they read Professor Rosen’s interview (see ). But hold on there, we admonished the youngsters. Glenn asks a very good question at one point. Why is Dan Froomkin gone from the Post when they employ other liberals? Let me ask you this: I imagine if Fred Hiatt were here, he would make the following defense, adopt the following response, which is—and he's already said this actually in his very vapid and meaningless form statement: “Oh, no, our firing of Froomkin had nothing to do with his political views, and in fact the proof of that”—he didn't say this, but I'll make this argument for him—“is that we have plenty of liberals at the Washington Post, we have Eugene Robinson, and E.J. Dionne and we just hired Ezra Klein as a Washington Post blogger.” They hired Greg Sargent away from TPM. So what is it about Froomkin that, in your view, made him intolerable to Fred Hiatt whereas those other individuals I just named at least as of yet are still there? ROSEN: Because he's not a liberal columnist. That was a complete lie, a description that sticks to him by Harris, the national staff, and ultimately by Fred Hiatt. He's an accountability journalist who practices his craft at the level that the Web makes possible. Greenwald asked a perfectly decent question: Why did Froomkin get dumped at the Post, even as the paper was hiring other liberals, like Ezra and Greg? Rosen gave a typically hopeless, rambling reply. This seems to be his role when he visits this part of the solar system. The Q-and-A goes on and on. To read the full exchange, just click here. You can read Rosen’s replies for yourself. For ourselves, we’ve been looking for an excuse to discuss Ezra Klein’s move to the Post. This is a good day for it. For starters: We of course have no way of knowing why the Post has dumped Dan Froomkin. Let’s repeat that: We simply don’t know. But if we were going to write a novel, as Rosen did—if we wanted to pretend that we knew—our novel would look like this: Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. Duh. We’ve explained this bone-simple point for years. If there’s one thing you’ll never see Dionne or Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. Dionne established this point quite brilliantly all through Campaign 2000. Of course he knew that his cohort was talking all manner of bullsh*t about Gore. (On one or two very tiny occasions, he even tinily said so.) But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them. We have been telling you this for years. Year after year after year. This brings us around to the recent hiring of Ezra Klein, a smart young liberal who just may know how to keep his big trap shut. (Froomkin doesn’t do that.) A few years ago, Ezra broke all the rules! Behaving much like Froomkin himself, he actually wrote something highly important—and perfectly accurate—about the mainstream press corps. By now, what Ezra wrote that day has become a part of history. But when he wrote it, it was still extremely relevant to an upcoming White House campaign. And omigod! He even wrote it right at the start of an American Prospect cover story! (To read Ezra’s piece, just click this.) In his cover story, Ezra was trying to figure out if Gore might run for the White House again, in 2008. As he started, he described a recent speech by Gore. We told you then what we tell you today. By the rules of the Washington mainstream press, this simply cannot be done (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/21/06): KLEIN (4/06): The address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the Associated Press headquarters in New York last October and attended by an audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators. In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore. Good God. He’d broken the largest rule in the book! Right at the start of a Prospect cover story, he accurately described what the “media establishment” did in Campaign 2000! He even named three famous news orgs! We don’t know why he picked the three he did; NBC News, and the Washington Post, had been much more culpable. But name three orgs he did. Every establishment journalist knows it: This simply isn’t allowed. You’re not allowed to tell the truth about what the coven has done. Ezra was just a kid in those days; he may not have understood. At any rate, we yodeled and yelled about what he had done, praising him for his bad etiquette. And you may recall what happened next. Ezra went on C-Span’s Washington Journal to discuss his cover story. And sure enough! He didn’t say a freaking word about the way his story began. Ezra’s statement was perfectly accurate. It was also highly relevant to any possible run by Gore. (At the time, we said Gore almost surely wouldn’t run, precisely because of what Erza described.) But Ezra’s statement was also highly relevant to a run by Hillary Clinton. If she had become the Dem nominee, she would quite likely have faced the same treatment Gore got in Campaign 2000. Voters deserved to be told about that. But so what? On C-Span, Ezra didn’t repeat what he’d said—and he never discussed it again. Go ahead: Reread what he wrote. In a rational world, is that remarkable statement the sort of thing a person says just once? In our novel, here’s what had happened: Someone took this bright kid aside and told him he was crazy. You can’t write things like that, they said, if you want to advance in this press corps! That what happens in our novel. It may not have happened in real life. But why is Ezra at the Post? This is what it says in our novel: Ever since making that rookie mistake, he’s kept his big trap shut. Liberals get to write about policy. They aren’t allowed to tell the truth about the “mainstream” press corps’ conduct. Dionne and Robinson know that rule. They know they must never disrespect it. Froomkin never played by that rule. Today, he’s on the street. In our novel, that’s why Froomkin is gone. Unlike the good professor from Neptune, we won’t huff and puff and thunder and roar and assert that we actually know that. But if you think it doesn’t work that way, you may be from a far planet too. Reread the remarkable thing Ezra wrote. What he wrote was blatantly accurate. Why does no one say it?

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• 25 Jun 2009 18:21

  LET EVERYONE DARE CALL US LIARS! If we let them name the LIARS, they’ll name Big Dems every time: THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2009 We’re all Professor Rosen now: Yesterday, our other professor sounded off about the dumbness of Max Baucus. In a profile in the New York Times, Baucus admitted he had a regret. He regretted eliminating single-payer from committee discussions of health care reform. Here was the full, improbable passage, penned by David Herszenhorn HERSZENHORN (6/24/09): [Baucus] conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position. Our other professor got conned by this fairly obvious nonsense PROFESSOR BLACK (6/24/09): I don't know why the Dems never learn this lesson. If you start with the compromise position, you will end up compromising on that. The professor linked to this Yglesias post. Headline: Baucus Regrets Not Including Single-Payer in the Health Care Mix. Are we all Professor Rosen now? Having asked, let us offer a fairly obvious speculation: In all likelihood, Baucus took single-payer off the table for a very good reason—because he isn’t trying to create a progressive health reform package. His statement to the Times was pure BS. After all, Baucus is a corporate man (data below). He wants health reform near the “center.” After the fact, he was covering his keister for those on the left. Our other professor bought it. Yglesias penned a thoughtful piece about the meaning of Baucus’ move. He too failed to note an obvious possibility: When Baucus voiced his regrets to the Times, it was a big silly con! Were we really supposed to believe that, after all these years, Baucus made the rookie mistake he described? That’s what Baucus told the Times. Our other professor believed him. Early comment: People! Baucus is a red-state corporate man. An early comment to the professor’s post saved us the bother of research COMMENTER (6/24/09): Report: Senator Max Baucus Received More Campaign Money from Health and Insurance Industry Interests than Any Other Member of Congress. In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political-action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical-supply firms, health-service companies and other health professionals.” Do you believe what Baucus said? You know what to do—just click here. We’re all Kenneth Starr now: Ten years ago, Kenneth Starr just couldn’t help it. Driven by a weak, shriveled soul, he published all the thrilling details about that woman, Miss Lewinsky. Last night, a big dumb block of cheese stepped into the Kenneth Starr role. South Carolina’s unfortunate newspaper, The State, had published a few of Mark Sanford’s e-mails. KeithO couldn’t run fast enough to read them on the air. (Regarding The State: You really have to hate a guy to publish such utterly meaningless twaddle—especially when you consider the embarrassment thereby dished to his wife and children. Regarding Olbermann: Others have been very polite about his own pursuit of the ladies. Olbermann seems to be a very slight fellow. But then, we’re all Kenneth Starr now: MADDOW (6/25/09): That was Republican Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, of course, at his 2 PM press conference today. The reporter, Gina Smith, who broke the story, who the governor mentioned over and over again in his long, at times rambling statements, will be joining us as our first guest in just a moment. Ms. Smith’s paper, which is called The State, based in South Carolina, not only broke the story this morning of the governor`s trip to Argentina, it also followed up his press conference today by releasing bombshell e-mails between the governor and the woman with whom he says he has had an affair. The provenance of those e-mails is not being disputed by the governor and he did admit, at his press conference, that the relationship had a major e-mail component. [...] Well, now, thanks to The State newspaper, we’ve got at least three of those e-mails, two from the governor to his mistress and one from the mistress to the governor. One of the e-mails from the governor is rather explicit. And now is the part where I just sit here for a second while you read that, because if I try to read it aloud, the way Keith did, I would blush so hard my face would pop. And then I’d fall down and we’d have to go to commercial break and come back with a different host. So, there you have it. The reason the explicitness of this e-mail matters to this as—I’m blushing now and I’m not even looking at it. The reason the explicitness of this e-mail matters to this as a news story is because it is probably what explains why the governor convened this press conference and announced this affair today. It probably explains why we learned about this today. Yeah, sure. Question: Has anyone ever been so disingenuous? As we’ve noted in the past, Dear Rachel always has to pretend that she’s embarrassed by the“explicit” stuff—the stuff she loves to pimp you. What a consummate phony! In April, she spent more than a week insulting average people with her moronic dick jokes. Night after night, she found ways to pretend that she was embarrassed by all that too. “Bombshell e-mails!”Not so much. But at least one e-mail was “rather explicit,” Our Own Kenneth Starr said. And then, she burned about three-fourths of her program with utter, waste-of-time, consummate nonsense about this thrilling event. How inane did her time-killing get? This inane: About halfway through her march to the sea, Maddow was reduced to wondering about the bystanders in the tape of Sanford’s press conference. How inane will Our Own Rhodes Scholar be? We’ve got your “Rhodes Scholar” right here: MADDOW: I know this isn’t the most important part of what’s going on at the press conference right here, but who are the people behind him who are cracking up while he’s giving this apology? SANFORD (videotape): I’ve been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with a—what started as a dear, dear friend from Argentina. It began very innocently, as I suspect many of these things do, in just a casual e-mail. I hurt her. I hurt you all. I hurt my wife. I hurt my boys. I hurt friends like Tom Davis. I hurt a lot of different folks. MADDOW: Kind of distracting and weird, wasn’t it? We tried to find out today who these people are. Are they reporters, staffers, interns, random passers-by who had no idea they were on national television while millions of people were watching? We don’t know. So far it remains a mystery. None of our sources in South Carolina were able to identify these folks. And again, it’s not the most important question raised by today`s Mark Sanford show. “So far it remains a mystery,” she clownishly said. But try to believe what this dim soul did: She actually tasked her staff to waste their time figuring out who those meaningless by-standers were! But there’s the shape of this sad program’s soul. Adding unintentional humor, she said this twice: “Again, it’s not the most important question raised by today’s Mark Sanford show.” No shit, Sherhack! If we might add what is merely obvious: That’s your Rhodes Scholar on Starr! (By the way: Why does someone spend 45 minutes on a topic like this? Because she cares about nothing else! Health care for average people? Please—they’re Tea-Baggers! They can go get themselves f*cked!) We thought KeithO was awful last night—until we watched Maddow. We thought TPM was sad yesterday afternoon—until we watched KeithO. And this morning, Gene Robinson hacks his way along in the Post with a bit of pissperfect clowning. Enough about Sanford’s wife and kids, he intones—after having made them his focus: ROBINSON (6/25/09): At least Gov. Mark Sanford faced the music alone—and I’ll bet the music running through his head was one of those dramatic, sweeping tangos that provide the perfect soundtrack for a visit to Buenos Aires. Tango lyrics are, essentially, blues lyrics in Spanish: somebody did somebody wrong. And that’s what happened. The only commendable thing Sanford has done lately was to stand before the television cameras by himself as he admitted that his mysterious five-day absence was in fact a trip to Argentina—to see the woman with whom he has been having an extramarital affair for the past year. He didn’t follow the lead of Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and all the others who somehow induced their aggrieved wives to literally stand by their men. That always seemed to be the ultimate betrayal why on earth those women would go along with the act. Humiliation is bad enough when it’s endured in private. It must be excruciating when it’s made into public display—for the benefit of the offending husband’s career. Enough about Sanford’s wife Jenny and their children, who did nothing to deserve all this. As for Sanford, if ever he deserved to be considered a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, he’s out of the picture now. For good. As he said today: “End of story.” Enough about Sanford’s wife and kids, this big hack says—after going out of his way to make them the focus of his half-column! But then, Robinson’s fatuous framework (At least he didn’t bring his wife!) has been standard among his cohort in the past eighteen hours. Matthews drove the framework last night; Barnicle was reciting it early this morning. Remember: In the world of Big Scripted Pundits, there must always be some Standard Framework for The Pundit Who Really Has Nothing To Say. Robinson recited one such framework today—pretending, like Rachel, that he’s too good to do what he had just done. (Ten years ago, as editor of Style, Robinson was one of Starr’s ambulance-chasers. As his cohort’s disapproval was transferred from Clinton to Gore, he published three mocking profiles of Gore in a two-week period, just as Gore was announcing his candidacy. Gore “even giggled like a girl at one point,” Ceci Connolly sweetly said in hers, the last of the Three Mocking Profiles. Bowing to the will of the clan, this big hack put that crap into print. Starr was on the Post’s front page at that time, sadly announcing that his great work would have to continue from there.) The intellectual and moral standards of your nation’s elites are just astoundingly low. Your nation is dying from this affliction, as you may have seen in the last eight years. (Years that were brought to you, in part, by Robinson.) But so what? It’s excellent for the corporate line when we serve this crap to the rubes! GE hired Keith and Rachel—and put a sports guy in charge of their work. Keith is a clown, and Rachel ain’t ready. And oh yes, one other thing: We’re all Ken Starr now. We’re all Ceci Connolly now: Well, not quite. But you could see that syndrome developing in Tuesday night’s “analysis” by Maddow. Tomorrow, we’ll show you how you got played. Not bad, Ceci might have grudgingly said. To watch the slick segment, . LET EVERYONE DARE CALL US LIARS: No, Virginia. Nothing “happened” to the press corps under Bush; they simply continued as before. And you’d have to be a fantasist to think that their work was done in good faith—that these elite-level professional journalists simply lacked sufficient imagination to deal with Bush’s outlier ways. And yet, we read that nonsense last weekend, in a column by one of our brightest progressives! (See .) Is life on earth a joke of the gods? Can Professor Rosen be for real when he hands us such consummate piffle? Of course, Brother Greenwald may have flailed a bit too in that discussion. Is some derangement syndrome at play when we’re willing to serve ourselves this? GREENWALD (6/19/09): One of the things I found so interesting in going back and reading your account and of the interviews you did, and I linked to it today and I'll do so again, is that the argument that Froomkin was making back then is that actually he wasn't a liberal at all. ROSEN: Right. GREENWALD: That what he was doing was acting adversarially to the party in power, which is what a reporter is supposed to do, and that happened to be a Republican administration spouting lots of lies, and he said, if it had been a Kerry administration that won in 2004, another Democratic administration, he would be doing exactly the same thing. And John Harris, in your interview with him, said, well, I—he sort of doubted it, so I guess we can't know for sure until it happens, but he seems to have a liberal viewpoint to me. Now, as it turns out, there haven't been very many more vigorous and persistent critics of Barack Obama since the inauguration than Dan Froomkin on many, many counts. He has constantly identified reasoning coming from the White House that he thinks is inconsistent or unpersuasive, or even misleading. He's criticized him for failing to live up to campaign promises. He wrote the other day that he's become an active participant in a cover-up of Bush crimes; he's criticized him for being too beholden to the financial industry in the regulations he's advocating. So it turns out that Dan Froomkin was right, clearly, when he was saying that he would be doing the same thing if there were a Democratic or liberal administration. As proof that Froomkin wasn’t really a liberal, Glenn cites his later criticisms of Obama—criticisms that largely have come “from the left!” Within the framework of our politics, for example, criticizing Obama “for being too beholden to the financial industry” will be scored as a “liberal” criticism. That doesn’t mean the criticism is “wrong” or invalid; indeed, we would tend to agree with the criticism. It simply means that the criticism doesn’t involve some simple statement of fact; it does involve a political viewpoint. There’s nothing wrong with such a viewpoint. But there is something wrong when one of our brightest progressives is willing to argue this way. We’re in an echo chamber of our own making when we persuade ourselves in such ways. Similarly, we always think we’re in an echo chamber when progressives argue in the following manner. In the following passage (from this earlier June 19 post), Glenn seems to say that reporters should be encouraged to tell us when Big Pols are lying: GREENWALD (6/19/09): Why was Froomkin deemed "liberal," inappropriate and biased? Because he pointed out that the Bush administration's claims were false and their policies radical—i.e., he wrote what was factually true. But that—writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power—is the number one sin in establishment journalism. [...] To be a real establishment journalist (objective), you're not allowed to say when one side is lying—even when they are. All you're allowed to do is repeat what both sides say and leave it at that (Colbert: "The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home"). Froomkin—unlike David Gregory—believes that reporters should actually point out when the Government is lying. That's what he did. That's why, to The Post, he wasn't a real reporter but, rather, an "ideologue." That's the sickness of American journalism in a nutshell. Then there's Froomkin's freakish, exotic belief that journalists should be adversarial to and skpetical of the claims of government officials, especially when it comes to matters of war and national security. In our view, we’re in a world of hurt when one of our smartest progressives writes such unformed mush—mush which resembles some of Froomkin’s mushy work at Nieman. (Sorry—we’re still avoiding the site, which got shut down this week.) What makes Glenn’s work so mushy? He walks away from some profoundly basic distinctions—distinctions which have been universally observed for millennia. As Froomkin tends to do, he draws no distinction between “false statements” and “lies.” Everyone in the western world has observed this (important) distinction, for several millennia. But we progressives have become so ardent that we now tend throw this distinction away. In the process, we seek a world where “objective establishment journalists” should be empowered to tell us who’s lying. But guess what, dumb-asses? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to make such judgments in recent decades. Just this Tuesday, Howard Kurtz reminded us of this obvious fact in a profile of Rahm Emanuel. In this passage, Kurtz is speaking of Emanuel’s work under President Clinton: KRUTZ (6/23/09): Emanuel came to view journalists as a constituency group, like members of Congress, that had to be stroked. He called Tim Russert every week, either to complain about NBC's coverage of Bill Clinton or suggest topics for "Meet the Press." Conservative critics also got the Rahm treatment. AfterMichael Kelly, then the New Republic's editor, called Clinton a "shocking liar," Emanuel took him to lunch. Emanuel called Times columnist William Safire "Uncle Bill" and had him over for dinner, despite his having called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar.” And how about this one: AL GORE, LIAR! That was the headline on a New York Post editorial in June 1999, two days after the world’s biggest liar launched his White House campaign. The LIAR had said he invented the Internet, the New York Post let us know. Can we talk? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to identify “LIARS” in recent decades. The problem is this: To the extent that they’ve had this freedom, they have kept calling Democrats LIARS. Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were endlessly described as the world’s biggest LIARS. And uh-oh! In the future, this is likely the way the mainstream press corps will work—to the extent that they’re given this power. In fairness, Professor Rosen knows nothing of this, being newly arrived from Pluto. He think the press corps’ problems began under Bush—and only because these elite professionals lacked imagination to deal with his outlier ways. (They were doing their best.) But if we continue to have an establishment press corps, it will be very unwise for liberals or progressives to task them with telling us who are the LIARS. Their track record on this point is clear. The establishment press is a tool of power. They will tend to call Big Pols of the more liberal party LIARS. They’ve done this for the past twenty years. Once financial regularity returns, they will likely resume this practice as the looting starts up again. Quite wisely, objective reporters have traditionally been forbidden from making this highly subjective judgment. (One obvious reason: In most cases, it’s very hard to know if a misstatement is a “lie.”) Yes, reporters should challenge and correct statements which are inaccurate, false or misleading. Yes, they should note patterns of same. But we’re living on the dark side of Neptune when we ask Establishment Journalists to identify the lies and the LIARS. In 1999 and 2000, they called Gore a LIAR for twenty straight months, inventing his LIES as they went along. (Ceci Connolly: Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal!) Amazingly, Professor Rosen hasn’t heard. But it’s how George Bush attained power. “False statements” and “lies” are two different things; the former is a great deal easier to identify than the latter. It’s amazing that we no longer know that, given this decade’s ardor. That said: The LIARS will always be the Dems, as long as we let the establishment name them. Decades later, professors doesn’t know. But Glenn doesn’t seem to know either. Tomorrow: Ezra yes, Froomkin no. Why is that?

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• 24 Jun 2009 13:40

  CECI’S NO-NOS, THEN AND NOW! Ceci has always been the best when it comes to misleading us rubes: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 2009 Nieman under attack: We’ll wait a day to continue our discussion of Rosen/Greenwald/Froomkin. The Nieman website shut down yesterday, apparently under some sort of viral attack. Some of Dan’s major columns are there, and we’d planned to cite them. Pining for Miss Lewinsky: Your financial system still lies in ruins. The future of health care is being debated. But America’s dumbest known Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” longs for that woman, Miss Lewinsky. Go ahead—just read today’s column. Maureen Dowd so longs for the good old days—the good old days of Full Tilt Miss Lewinsky—that she devotes the bulk of her column to the naughty sexual antics of a Big Pol who lives far away DOWD (6/24/09): His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet whom he later appointed as Minister of Equal Opportunities; and again last month when Lario charged her randy hubby with “consorting with minors” after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace. In this case, the randy hubby—the current Big He—is Silvio Berlusconi. Dowd was willing to go to Italy to capture a topic she liked. (The big surprise? She didn’t make her editors fly her over.) Can we talk? If World War III broke out tomorrow, Dowd would still be casting about for reasons to flog randy sex. More than half of Dowd’s column today concerns Berlusconi’s antics. You have to read well past the fold to reach her thoroughly vapid thoughts about something transpiring here in this country. Translation: Dowd had nothing to say today. And in her heart, she continues to pine for the days of that woman, Miss Lewinsky. By the way: None of this happened before Bush came in. And Dowd and her cohort behave in good faith. They just lacked sufficient imagination when confronted with Bush, a real outlier. Who cares about health care/Rachel Maddow edition: In fairness, Dowd ain’t the only one who doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about health care. Last night, Rachel Maddow rolled out her standard assortment of topics: Topic one: What is happening in Iran.Topic two: What is happening in Iran. Topic three: How weird are Republicans, Mark Sanford edition. Topic four: Don’t ask, don’t tell. This was somewhat reminiscent of Monday night’s assortment of topics: Topic one: What is happening in Iran. Topic two: What is happening in Iran. Topic three: What is happening in Iran. Topic four: How weird are Republicans, Mark Sanford edition. Iran is a major news story, of course. But it isn’t the only news story—except perhaps at the boutique end of the progressive world. On the Maddow Show, you now get to hear about Iran—and after that, as your reward, you get to hear that Republicans are stupid. In earlier weeks, you got to hear about torture (another real issue). Now as then, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will also get sprinkled through. (It’s a real issue too.) Health care? That’s left to Ed Schultz. He blusters away at 6 PM, watched by way few viewers. To us, this increasingly looks like a case of upper-class pseudo-progressivism. Could the answer to this topic selection possibly lie in the world of Bill Wolff? Wolff is lord of all MSNBC prime-time “news programs.” Last night, he even appeared in a humor slot at the end of Maddow’s program. (To enjoy his stylings, click here Wolff came to the network in 2005. He’d been hired to produce the network’s new Tucker Carlson vehicle (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/19/09). Before that, he had no background in news at all. He had co-written a sports-themed movie for Martin Lawrence (Rebound). And he had produced a series of gong-show, shout-at-each-other programs for the Fox Sports Network. That was it! But so what? Within a few months, Wolff had been put in charge of MSNBC’s complete prime-time news line-up. But then too, Maddow had little background in news when she was picked to host her program. In our view, it frequently shows. Increasingly, the Maddow Show strikes us as an example of upper-class boutique pseudo-progressivism. Who cares about health care? Not Maureen Dowd. But then, there isn’t a lot of interest in the dreary topic on GE’s top “news” programs either. (Before wasting his time on those pointless sports shows, Wolff grew up in a wealthy St. Louis suburb. Mom was an associate general counsel for Anheuser Busch. For the record, Wolff describes himself as a “bleeding-heart liberal.” We assume that Wolff is a very nice guy. But sometimes, that self-description translates as: “boutique.”) Final note: According to Nexis, Maddow last said the words “health care” on last Thursday’s program. It was part of a fleeting reference to—what else?— the stupidity of a health care plan put forward by stupid Republicans. On Maddow, you get to hear about torture, and about Iran. And then, as a special treat, you get to hear that the other tribe is stupid. Occasionally, you get to hear sexual insults hurled at the working-class Americans who have the most at stake in the (well-ignored) health care debate. This has always been the way of part of the progressive world. Like Dowd, Maddow seems to care about people elsewhere. People here? Perhaps not quite so much. The public, God bless them: An uninformed public muddles along inside an uninformed health care debate. In this morning’s Washington Post, a new poll helps us see how unsteady the public’s perceptions and outlooks may be. As a simple matter of personal pride, Ceci Connolly never describes anything accurately. But in what follows, she came fairly close. Does the public support inclusion of a “public plan” in a health care package? The public may not be sure: CONNOLLY (6/24/09): Survey questions that equate the public option approach with the popular, patient-friendly Medicare system tend to get high approval, as do ones that emphasize the prospect of more choices. But when framed with an explicit counterargument, the idea receives a more tepid response. In the new Post-ABC poll, 62 percent support the general concept, but when respondents were told that meant some insurers would go out of business, support dropped sharply, to 37 percent. Actually, that isn’t quite what “respondents were told.” But as Connolly notes, 62 percent of respondents said they would “support having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans.” (For the record, no comparison to Medicare was included in the question.) But uh-oh! Support dropped to 37 percent when this further question was asked: What if having the government create a new health insurance plan made many private health insurers go out of business because they could not compete? As we noted yesterday, we always thought that was the point of including a private plan (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/23/09). But in the Post poll, support dropped to 37 percent when this possibility was specifically mentioned. Before long, Connolly quoted a respondent making a perfectly sensible comment: CONNOLLY: Majority support for certain new government action, however, does not come with high hopes: Half of all Americans said they think the quality of their health care will stay about the same if the system changes, and 31 percent expect it to deteriorate. "We're spending a lot and not necessarily getting the bang for our buck," Philip Arms, 58, of Northwest Washington, said in a follow-up interview. Despite his desire for reform, “I'm not necessarily convinced it won't make things worse.” Well actually, they didn’t say they “expected it to deteriorate.” They said that, in their “best guess,” they think it will “get worse.” As a point of pride, Connolly never makes a perfectly accurate statement. Could a health reform package possibly make an individual’s health care worse? Of course it could! In a related report, Peter Slevin made our blood run cold: SLEVIN (6/24/09): Mindful that supporters will not agree on all details, Obama has distilled his position to three principles: reduce cost, ensure quality and provide choice, including a public insurance option. As for the details, Obama's troops are asking supporters to trust the president's judgment. Or, if we might quote our Frost: “Trust us, the Voices said.” (Just click here Should we clueless ones trust the president’s judgment? We’re not entirely sure why we should. Obama, and especially his congressional chieftains, are part of the most god-awful foolish prolonged public discussion ever staged on the face of the earth. In the Post poll, 84 percent of respondents voiced concern that a health reform package might increase their health-care costs. You’d think that would be hard to do when you consider these comical numbers: United States: $5711 Finland: $2104 That’s what two countries spent per person on health care, in the year 2003. You might almost think that an overhaul might leave the US spending less. But Obama’s congressional chieftains are part of a system which has relentlessly failed to explore the meaning of those astonishing numbers—of other such numbers from other countries (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/18/09). Our view? When people refuse to discuss and explain such remarkable numbers, there are reasons for their refusal. No one’s so dumb that they can’t see how astounding those numbers are. Should you trust such people to make things better? We can’t really see why you should. Think of the oddness of the idea that reform might leave you spending more. If you’re a family of four, think how much more your family spent on health care in 2003, compared to a family in Finland! (No, you can’t just multiply by four. But the number would be very large.) The disparities here are simply stunning. And yet, you live in a world whose press and politicians have made no effort, over many years, to explain that groaning disparity. We’ll only suggest that this wide-spread silence suggests a debate which is “fixed.” The refusal to discuss those numbers is a stunning part of our culture. For ourselves, we favor whatever Krugman favors. If he supports a health reform package, then by god we’ll do so too! But should people trust Obama—and his chieftains—to lower those astonishing, undiscussed costs? We can’t imagine why. Your public conversation has long been fixed. Many forces have agreed to avoid discussing those ludicrous numbers. Big newspapers haven’t gone there. Neither has the more liberal of the two major parties. Your public discussion has long been fixed. Unless you read Professor Rosen, of course, in which case well-intentioned elite-level professional journalists haven’t had sufficient imagination to deal with such “outlier” numbers. They’d like to discuss those astounding data, right on the New York Times’ front page. Over the years, one thing has stopped them: They can’t figure out how. Ceci’s no-nos, then and now: By happenstance, we’ve been working on Connolly’s gruesome “reporting” from March through August, 1999. It’s always stunning to see her skill at insinuating things she can’t say. In June 1999, for example, Gore made his formal announcement—he was running for president. He was asked his view about Bill and Monica, again and again and again. The impeachment trial had ended four months earlier—and Gore had repeatedly criticized Clinton’s conduct, dating back to September 1998. (“Inexcusable/indefensible.”) But the press corps longed to hear nothing else. They wanted to hear it again and again. Our “journalists” pined for continued talk about Bill and that woman. On 20/20, Diane Sawyer asked Gore—again and again—what he thought about Bill and Monica. Nothing Gore said was quite enough. In a truly foolish performance, Dinsy kept asking him why he wouldn’t say something a little bit stronger. During this moronic week, Gore said the same things on this subject that he had said for nine solid months. But the children began to pretend that he’d flip-flopped—that he had just said, “for the first time,” that he disapproved of Bill’s conduct. This was utterly, blatantly bogus—and Ceci was stuck with that knowledge! Again and again, she had reported Gore’s prior criticisms, over the prior nine months. (During that period, Gore had to keep repeating himself because reporters kept asking about it.) But everyone else was misstating this fact, and modern pseudo-journalism is all about running with the Phony Group Story. And so, she came up with some wonderful constructs! On June 16, 17 and 27, she implied that Gore had just criticized Clinton “for the first time.” But with truly remarkable skill, she didn’t quite say it. Ceci has always been the best when it comes to baldly misleading us rubes. Now, she’s covering health care reform! In fairness, we never saw any sign that her war against Gore was “political.” Mainly, she seemed to be in a ball-fisted fury about those ten blow jobs, like the rest of her crackpot crowd. But no print journalist did more than she to keep Gore out of the White House. Guess who went there instead? Ceci has always been the best when it comes to baldly misleading us rubes. Unless you’re Professor Rosen, of course, in which case she was an elite-level professional journalist who lacked sufficient imagination to know how to deal with a pair of outliers like Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

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• 23 Jun 2009 09:19

  THIS JUST IN FROM PROFESSOR PANGLOSS! Everyone on earth knows this. Except our progressive leaders: TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2009 Perusing Will’s deduction: George F. Will made some a slick deduction in Sunday’s column in the Washington Post. Nobody can fool guy! Thanks to the work of conservative analysts, Will thinks he may have solved a puzzle. Why does Obama want a “public option”—a government insurance plan—as one part of his health care package? Thanks to some leading conservative minds, George Will thinks he may know WILL (6/21/09): The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a "single-payer”—government-run—system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system. Conservatives say that a government program will have the intended consequence of crowding private insurers out of the market, encouraging employers to stop providing coverage and luring employees from private insurance to the cheaper government option. Huh! Obama wants a “public plan” because it would lead to a single-payer system! Will was able to make this deduction because of the things some “conservatives say.” We can’t read minds here at THE HOWLER. We don’t know if Obama will insist on including a public plan in a final package. Nor do we know why he has proposed such a plan in the first place. But next time ,Will might try reading the work of some liberals if he wants to know what may be up. Below, we give you Paul Krugman, more than two years ago, writing about the release of John Edwards’ health reform package. Edwards had become the first Major Dem to release such a package. His package contained a public plan—and Edwards had explained why: KRUGMAN (2/9/07): “Health Markets,'' the press release says, ''will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.''This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now—after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan's low premiums, or lose the competition. And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. ''Over time,'' the press release says, ''the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.” Duh. Later plans by Obama and Clinton included this same feature—and Edwards had explicitly said it might lead toward single-payer. And it’s not like this notion went underground after that. One year later, Edwards withdrew from the race—and Krugman discussed the contribution he’d made through his health care proposal: KRUGMAN (2/1/08): Before the Edwards plan was unveiled, advocates of universal health care had difficulty getting traction, in part because they were divided over how to get there. Some advocated a single-payer system—a k a Medicare for all—but this was dismissed as politically infeasible. Some advocated reform based on private insurers, but single-payer advocates, aware of the vast inefficiency of the private insurance system, recoiled at the prospect. With no consensus about how to pursue health reform, and vivid memories of the failure of 1993-1994, Democratic politicians avoided the subject, treating universal care as a vague dream for the distant future. But the Edwards plan squared the circle, giving people the choice of staying with private insurers, while also giving everyone the option of buying into government-offered, Medicare-type plans—a form of public-private competition that Mr. Edwards made clear might lead to a single-payer system over time. And he also broke the taboo against calling for tax increases to pay for reform. Suddenly, universal health care became a possible dream for the next administration. In the months that followed, the rival campaigns moved to assure the party's base that it was a dream they shared, by emulating the Edwards plan. And there's little question that if the next president really does achieve major health reform, it will transform the political landscape. Given the control of society’s bosses, many aspects of world health care can’t be discussed in our mainstream press. For the most part, citizens aren’t allowed to know that other countries provide full coverage at half the cost. Citizens never see front-page reports examining how these countries have done it. In a rational world, you’d see such reports. But your knowledge is rationed—by power. That said, we would have thought that everyone knew the dream behind that public plan. As Edwards said in February 2007, such a plan might lead to single-payer! Until we perused Will’s deduction this week, we thought that everyone knew. THIS JUST IN FROM PROFESSOR PANGLOSS: According to Professor Jay Rosen, history began in 2001—or a year or two later perhaps. Granted, Jay isn’t a history professor; this may help explain this unusual theory. But many liberals get their ideas of our recent history from Rosen—from last Friday’s interview with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, to cite an unfortunate example. (Click here.) We’ll leave it to parents of NYU students to demand tuition money back. But in the following passage, Jay explained the recent history of America’s political press corps. As we said yesterday: If society’s bosses invented a critique of the press, this perfect screaming nonsense is the critique they’d invent: ROSEN (6/19/09): Well, to answer that, Glenn, I have to go back to your question you said you were going ask: How do I interpret these events? And here is the explanation that occurs to me after three or four years of blogging about this general subject, and well over 20 posts written about the larger story here, which is, because Bush in his agenda for the expansion of executive power, in what I call the opacity agenda that followed from that, which is while you're expanding executive power, you're pulling a curtain over the government in as many ways as you can, and by increasing opacity, that itself is an expansion of executive power. As well as the roll back of the press itself, to a greater distance so that it can't see as well as the triumph over congressional oversight. The radical agenda that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson talks about as a former aide to Colin Powell. After three or four years of blogging about this subject, and well over 20 posts written about the larger story, Jay churned out that perfect nonsense. And Glenn acted as if it made good sense. Indeed, he actively affirmed Jay’s history lesson near the end of the interview, referring to “the way that the Bush era has affected political journalism as you just described it in several of your earlier answers.” Why is the progressive world eternally helpless? Because we “reason” like that. Let’s examine the ludicrous premises implied by Rosen’s history. According to Jay: *The “elite-level political” press corps was trying to deal with Bush in a professional manner. They just “didn’t know how to cope” with such a total “outlier.” Their imagination failed. *As such, this problem seems to have started under Bush. There is no sign that similar failures of imagination were visible in the work of our elite-level press before Bush entered the White House. Each of those notions is utterly daft. This is history as written on Neptune. What’s wrong with the professor’s notions? Let us count the ways: To state the obvious, the mainstream press corps had melted down long before Bush reached the White House. Nothing changed when they encountered Bush. During the 1990s, the elite-level press accepted every bit of “outlier” conduct from the right, no matter how inane or daft. Claims of presidential murder and drug-running made perfect sense. And, of course, Clinton, Gore and Clinton were all big world-class liars. Sorry. The professional press corps lay in ruins by the time of the mid-decade Medicare pseudo-debate (1994-1996). And their conduct went downhill from there. That in mind, it’s lunacy to suggest that the press corps’ problems began when they couldn’t figure out Bush. (Because he was such an outlier!) It’s almost as strange to keep asserting what Jay fairly clearly asserts—to claim that the press corps was trying to do its job in the Bush era, but lacked sufficient imagination. If society’s bosses wanted to con you, that is exactly what they would say. But they don’t have to invent such tales. Our professors are there to do that! Was the press corps trying to do its job under Bush? Motive is famously hard to assess. No doubt, some individuals were acting in something resembling good faith—and it seems fairly clear that many were not. But a deeply gonzo group dynamic was clearly driving this professional cohort long before Bush ever entered the White House. The examples from the 1990s are legion—though Jay and Glenn seem to have been off the planet during that particular decade. This allows Jay to muse about the good intentions that were foiled by Bush’s outlier ways. And about the well-intentioned press corps’ lack of imagination. Did something new begin under Bush? Please. That’s utterly ludicrous. If anything, the press corps’ conduct was much more ridiculous in the previous decade. Examples of ludicrous press corps conduct from the 1990s are of course legion. (And yes, we’re discussing group conduct.) Gene Lyons wrote an entire book about same, Fools for Scandal. It was published in early 1996—and had therefore been written earlier. But for unknown reasons, of all such examples, Rosen’s history has brought Mark Shields to our mind in the past few days. To see the way your “professional, elite-level political journalists” were working before Bush reached the White House, consider the conduct of this famous liberal on June 23, 2000. This involves the execution of Gray Graham, star of one of Texas’ most famous—and most unfortunate—death penalty cases. Indeed, this happened to be one of the worst such cases the Texas system had ever created. It was clear there was no way to know that Graham had really committed the murder in question; beyond that, he had been “defended” by the hapless Ronald Mock, one of the gonzo public defenders famously employed by the state in such cases. Plainly, there was no way Governor Bush could have known that Graham was guilty of the murder in question—but Graham got fried all the same! And sho nuff! When Bush held a press conference to ponder the execution, no one in Rosen’s “elite-level press” asked him how he’d decided not to extend such clemency as his office permitted. Why hadn’t Bush acted in this case? Nobody bothered to ask! The failure to ask this question was stunning. But the next night, on the elite-level NewsHour, Shields offered these gonzo thoughts about Bush’s masterful brilliance: SHIELDS (6/23/00): As somebody who has mentioned on this broadcast that George W. Bush—the doubts voters have about him is that he fills the chair, whether he’s big enough, whether he really has the heft to be president—I thought this was probably the finest moment of his campaign as he explained his position. He did it as, outside of a press conference, in a suit and tie, with appropriately serious words and manner. And I thought ironically that it worked for him politically without being overly analytical. Incredibly, Shields praised Bush for wearing a suit, and for adopting an “appropriately serious manner.” For these reasons, “this was probably the finest moment of his campaign,” the deeply principled professional pundit very soberly said. (Paul Gigot quickly echoed these thoughts.) So you’ll know: This was one month after Shields’ cohort had endlessly trashed the vile Candidate Gore for opposing Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security—repetitively praising Bush for the “bold leadership” he displayed by making his proposal. (For a fuller account of the Graham/Shields matter, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/6/02.) Of course, such ludicrous conduct had long been the norm in the White House campaign then under way. Shields’ cohort had spent a astounding amount of time the previous autumn discussing the wardrobe of Candidate Gore—trashing him for his three-button suits, for his polo shirts, for the fact that he wore a brown suit. (For his cowboy boots! For the way he hemmed his pants!) Do you mind if we tell you something obvious? By now, the elite-level press corps were tribunes to power. They existed to bash the more liberal party—and to praise every notion, no matter how inane, which came from its more conservative counterpart. But then, this had been going on for years by this point in time. The press didn’t have an “outlier” Republican president to sympathize with during this era—so they had sympathized with an endless stream of gonzo claims from an outlier Republican congress. They couldn’t quite see how strange it was when Vince Foster’s suicide was investigated four times. Starting in the summer of 1994, they couldn’t make out the problem with the poll-tested GOP claim that no one is cutting Medicare—we’re just slowing the rate at which it will grow. (When Clinton accurately disagreed, they called him a liar. Much as they would later do when Gore opposed privatization.) In short, when Bush became president, nothing changed —the press corps continued its ludicrous conduct in service to conservative power. Before, they had served an outlier congress. Now, an outlier president. Rosen was living on Neptune then, or he would know these things. Of course, if he ever sat down and did some reading, he could learn that way too. Tell us, readers! Do you think Mark Shields was acting in good faith that night, but somehow lacked sufficient imagination to offer a more sensible analysis? For ourselves, we don’t know how to explain his ludicrous, disgraceful conduct. But because we aren’t fools, and we don’t live on Neptune, we do somehow know this: By the late 1990s, the “professional, elite-level political” press corps had long since become a clowning disgrace—and it was a reliable mouthpiece for conservative/Republican blather. Nothing changed when Bush came in. The process had been established for years. The process simply continued. We have no idea why we’d want to pretend that the press corps tried its best, but failed, to deal with President Bush. Quite blatantly, they had been fools for power for many years before they became fools for Bush. Everyone alive knows this. Except our progressive leaders. It’s hard to contain the anger we feel when people like Rosen peddle such pap. (Good God. He even cited the noble Wilkerson!) But if we believe that the press corps’ noble professionals simply suffered a failure of imagination under Bush, we might want to extend their powers as we move forward from here. That’s what Greenwald keeps suggesting. It’s a deeply gruesome idea. Tomorrow: Let them yell liar!

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