Politico Is All About The Politico

Steve Benen points us to this Politico story: The Obama Cabinet is a CEO black hole.

Holy shit! Call the cops! Obama hasn't surrounded himself with CEOs!

Ludicrous. If Obama had two CEO’s in his cabinet, Politico would write it's at least two too many. They’d say he's repeating the failed strategies of George Bush.

Politico will write about almost anything as long as they can do so in a way that will keep people talking about Politico. We fall for it every time.

-AF

They Said It. I Repeat It.

"President Bush exudes serenity as he prepares to leave office, content that the war in Iraq is nearly won and he had the fortitude to buck his party despite incredible pressure to withdraw."

Fox News
01/10/09

-AF

I Was Just Thinking...

Rod Blagojevich looks like he dropped out of a '90s amateur Hungarian porno movie.

He wouldn't have to change his first name either.

The moments before his inauguration is awfully early in his presidency for Barack Obama to be pandering to Jesus freaks who wanna deny GLBT civil rights.

You'd think our first African-American President would not be completely tone deaf on this one.

I still miss Joe Strummer terribly but worse so this month.

Likewise John Lennon.

"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"? - Best. Christmas song. Ever.

Rahm Emmanuel is a badass.

John Stewart too -- ask Huckabee.

George Tenet is most decidely not.

What's with the Bush Administration's mad flurry to screw us all some more before he's kicked out the door? Hasn't he fucked us enough already?

The Red Sox really don't need Mark Teixiera next year.

The seven following years following that are another story altogether.

Dunno how I feel about Bill Clinton's donor list. If this is the way any of the money we've thrown at Blackwater winds up doing some good, it ain't all a bad thing.

The mainstream media is so fucked for thinking that Pastor Rick Warren is offensive solely to "gay groups."

Color million of us straight folks offended as well.

I always liked Coldplay better back when they were called Radiohead. Not so much now.

Now that we've learned Chrysler execs will still get paid while the plants shut down, I'd really like to see breakouts of total salaries for Chrysler's white collar workers versus the same for Chrysler's rank and file.

For tens of thousands of people across the Northeast to still be without power after more than a week is completely unacceptable.

At least our Republican Congress folks are predictable.

Elvis Costello has become mellow, even playful, as he's aged.

Dick Cheney has not.

Can we legalize pot already? Now that would boost the economy.

Go Franken go!

Rachel Maddow is on fire.

George Bush's recent address to the War College was downright strange and patently false. Why change now George, right?

-AF
**12/19/08: Updated with additional links where appropriate.

Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah...

LA Times labels Rush & his fellow fabricators "shameless":

You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn't pretend to be fair.

He just pretends to tell the truth.

-AF
(HT: ThinkProgress)

CBS Proposed Wingers Review Rather

I knew CBS screwed Dan Rather royally but I didn't know it was this bad.

Rather is suing CBS for a cool $70 million over the circumstances of his "Rathergate" dismissal. The NY Observer dug through papers Rather's legal team submitted last week. It learned that CBS' shortlist for Rather's "independent review panel" featured a long list of right-wing partisans. Some of them are even journalists:
William Buckley (TNR), Robert Novak, Kate O’Beirne (TNR & then @CNN!), Tucker Carlson (I'm starting to feel dirty here), Pat Buchanan (OK, I'm officially dirty), George Will (What? Pol Pot wasn't available?), Lou Dobbs (WTF? Right wing CNN anchor reviews CBS anchor?), Matt Drudge (Puh-leeze), Robert Kagan (PNAC + Papa do not make one worthy), Fred Barnes (Does anyone even read WS or watch FoxNews?), William Kristol (another Murdoch trust fund baby), John Podhoretz (Mama's Boy is to journalism what cinder blocks are to swimming), David Brooks (Soon-to-be banished to the farthest corner of the realm), William Safire (Wordsmythe, Nixonite & "libertarian conservative" whatever the fuck that is), Bernard Goldberg (FoxNews crank then@CBS News), Ann Coulter (don't even go there -- I said don't), Andrew Sullivan (Why, oh why?), Christopher Hitchens (depends on what he's drinking & for how long), PJ O’Rourke (depends on which PJ shows up & for how long), Christopher Caldwell ("No, my father-in-law did not get me this gig"), Elliot Abrams (like a cockroach, he'll never go away), Charles Krauthammer (a sad, delusional man), William Bennett (nicotine-addict/ex-Drug Czar/ homophobe/degenerate gamber), Rush Limbaugh (not qualified to fucking mowing Rather's lawn) and, written at the bottom, FoxNews' Dark Lord Roger Ailes (**shudder**).

Considering these stalwart wingers for their Rather “independent review panel” is sorta like Frank Perdue announcing plans to have foxes guard his hen house. Had CBS been truly interested in getting to the bottom of how Rather's report was sourced and erred aired, they wouldn't have considered a veritable murder's row of neo-con hacks and competitors! Shortly thereafter the Grand PooBah himself, lifelong Dem Sumner Redstone, conspicuously flipped Republican.

Please note that I chose to break two names out of the above pack as they have been unintentionally and undeservedly tarnished by association. One is NY Observer's own Nicholas Von Hoffman, who CBS fired for saying "Mr. Nixon is the dead mouse on the kitchen floor, and the American family, in slippers and bathrobe, is gathered around him arguing over who will pick him up by his tail and drop him in the trash" is as much a neo-con as you'd expect any friend of Gary Trudeau to be. The other is Robert (no relation to Gnarls or Charles) Barkley has been a tireless education reformer who penned the moving Grandfather's Apology two weeks ago.

-AF
(HT: ThinkProgress)

Met All My Heroes, Found Out They Were Zeroes.*

What a total letdown.

I grew up watching Tom Brokaw. Millions of us did. As a long time broadcaster myself, I respected Mr. Brokaw for many things not the least of which was his unimpeachable journalistic integrity. Boy, was I wrong!

MoveOn sent me this:

Dear MoveOn member,

Sunday on Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw moderated a debate between McCain strategist Steve Schmidt and Obama strategist David Axelrod on topics ranging from Iraq to the Wall Street bailout. At the end, Tom Brokaw did something strange. He opted to give himself the last word and told the audience:

In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note. And that is that we continue to poll on who's best equipped to be Commander in Chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

We checked, and the latest NBC poll actually has no question about Commander in Chief. We contacted NBC about this, and it turns out Brokaw was referring to a poll taken weeks ago--right after the Republican convention and well before Friday's big national security debate. And in each of NBC's last two polls, Americans chose Obama over McCain.
(MoveOn link with sources here).
(Demand an NBC retraction thru the "Meet The Press" feedback forum here).

"In fairness to everybody here"? is a bizarrely inappropriate us of the phrase. There is no goddamn "fairness" whatsoever in quoting out-of-date poll numbers to inaccurately portray one candidate as strong and the other as ineffectual. I was dumbstruck before I clicked on Media Matters to find this:

On Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC's Tom Brokaw allowed McCain strategist Steve Schmidt to falsely claim that John McCain had called for Don Rumsfeld to be fired. That's an old lie that the McCain campaign had abandoned long ago -- but Brokaw let Schmidt get away with bringing it back.

What the fuck?!? This fucking guy is moderating the second Presidential debate on Oct. 7th! How could it possibly get worse? Oh, it can and it does.

HuffPo tips us to today's NY Times Brokaw profile:

But less widely known is that Mr. Brokaw has also played a pivotal role out of public view, both within NBC and in its dealings with the campaign of John McCain in particular.

In an interview here after Sunday’s broadcast, Mr. Brokaw said that over the summer he had “advocated” within the executive suite of NBC News to modify the anchor duties of the MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election night and on nights when there were presidential debates. Their expressions of strong political opinions from the MSNBC anchor desk has run counter to the more traditional role Mr. Brokaw played on “NBC Nightly News” for more than two decades. NBC said earlier this month that the two hosts would mostly relinquish their anchor duties to Mr. Gregory, while being present as analysts.

“Keith is an articulate guy who writes well and doesn’t make his arguments in a ‘So’s your old mother’ kind of way,” Mr. Brokaw said. “The mistake was to think he could fill both roles. The other mistake was to think he wouldn’t be tempted to use the anchor position to engage in commentary. That’s who he is.”

Mr. Brokaw said he had also conducted some shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between NBC and the McCain campaign. His mission, he said, was to assure the candidate’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular — Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates — until his name was invoked.

“One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, ‘If it’s an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won’t go,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said. “My name came up, and they said, ‘Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it’s going to be Brokaw.’”

So Brokaw is acting as mediator/go-between/chief-sucker-upper for NBC to McCain-Palin 2008. If this sort of interaction occurred between a kid running for high school class president and his high school's paper, it would be considered unseemly. This is one of the Big fucking Three! NBC's use of Tom Brokaw in this role is not only distasteful, but it also spells the very death of their news division's integrity and objectivity. This is absolutely one of the strangest moves I've ever seen a network pull.

NBC's motivation is unclear. Is Brokaw moderating this debate in order for NBC to guarantee McCain's participation? Or were McCain's handlers' complaints about Keith & co. a successful blackmail campaign+ that forced the network to ensure a McCain-friendly Brokaw as moderator? Or both? Or something else entirely? Dunno. And why the hell, at this stage in an otherwise stellar & legendary career, would Tom Brokaw willingly let NBC pimp him out?

But wait...There's more:

Last week during the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, Mr. Brokaw said, he spoke briefly with Mr. McCain, who has not appeared on “Meet the Press” since Mr. Russert’s death. While Mr. Brokaw said he and the Republican nominee are not personal friends, he did say they are “friendly” and “always had a great relationship.”

Of the prospects for a potential booking, Mr. Brokaw said: “We’re going to get him. I don’t know exactly where or when.”

As for Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, thus far she has passed over “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” in favor of interviews with “World News With Charles Gibson” on ABC and the “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.” She has also yet to accept an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press,” a point Mr. Brokaw said he raised with her when they met for a moment at the Clinton Global Initiative.

“I told her, ‘I’m the only one in this business who ever had Susan Butcher as a house guest,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said, referring to the Iditarod champion, who died in 2006. “Susan Butcher is to Alaska what Cal Ripken is to Baltimore.”

Ugh. I cannot tell how much of this Brokaw bungle can be attributed to: intense NBC News' pressure to secure McCain and Palin for "Meet The Press", individual ideology, diminished ability, the network's and/or his personal desire to overcompensate (for the Olbermann/Maddow faction's many "sins"), poor judgment, weariness, a massive McCain man-crush or what have you.

What I do know is that the Tom Brokaw I grew up with would never quote a three-week-old poll and present it as current. What's worse is I now find it entirely conceivable that Brokaw's lil' poll faux pas may been accidentally on purpose. That's a very bad thing.

C&L's Nichole Belle has more here and here.

-AF

*(I'm paraphrasing some damn song and it's driving me crazy that I cannot recall the title). +McCain has obviously adopted the Bush administration "punish any critical news media" credo.

Richard Cohen Comes Clean

One of the all-time great McCain media shills goes off the reservation:

Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain's abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on "The View," the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig -- an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

But that's not the most remarkable part of Cohen's op-ed. This is:

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty.

Ho-lee She-it!

Let's just hope Cohen sticks to his guns and aggressively pushes this issue.
If he does, will any the other 2045 some-odd journalists in thrall to "honest" John McCain follow suit?

Cohen's entire mea culpa is here.

-AF

(HT: Raw Story)

Update: The St. Petersburg Times chimes in with "Campaign of Lies Disgraces McCain"

They Said It. I Repeat It.

“It must have been a challenge for him to walk so confidently with Woodward's lips attached to his backside."

Bloomberg book critic Craig Seligman describes Bob Woodward's portrayal of George W. Bush in the newly released The War Within.

-AF
(HT: Raw Story)

This Does Not Surprise Me...

...But the sheer extent of it does. The Media fucked us big time.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, news executives across the board dictated that the coverage reflect the wave of patriotism sweeping our nation. Concerned far more about ratings than the truth, the folks upstairs killed stories critical of the administration, admonished/fired/reassigned overly aggressive or outspoken reporters, required two conservative guests for every dissenter(no liberals could be interviewed alone), pushed stories that were positive to the Bush Administration, etc.

Glenn Greenwald has the lowdown.

-AF

Stephanopoulos Gets Questions From Hillary Before Debate

I couldn't resist. I totally swiped the basic concept from some months-old winger blog post.

-AF

You Fucked Up File: ABC

Welcome to the inaugural entry to ASIAF's YFUF. What's a "YFUF"? A dear friend and former colleague in the music biz has to deal with any number of challenging, demanding artists from baby bands to international superstars based all over the globe. Years ago he instituted what he calls the "You Fucked Up File." When the band inevitably fucks something up, it's added to their YFUF. This way if there are any disputes about why a third single isn't released from a disappointing album, tour support is reduced, etc., he whips out their YFUF and sets them straight.

Last night saw the worst ever piece of election coverage by any network not named Fox. After 3,492 Democratic debates you'd think ABC could get it right. Not that I watched it. I have read and viewed much of the press coverage. Sometimes that's more important than what actually happened. Because by all accounts your average American couldn't have tolerated more than 5 minutes of it, this was one of those times.

Yes, the candidates' performance was lackluster. But ABC's Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos acted like they had participated in some perverse pre-debate Right Wing Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. WTF was up with that?

You know ABC fucked up when the crowd actually and loudly booed Gibson. You know they blew it when Obama is asked about some badass he knew when he was 8 years-old. You know it was awful when Editor & Publisher's Editor Greg Mitchell calls it "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years." You know it was bad when one of the many gotcha questions is supplied by Sean Hannity and NY right wing radio looney Steve Malzberg. You know it was terrible when Philly's Daily News' Will Bunch rips it not once but twice. You know it went well past weak when the "flag pin" kerfuffle and every other kerfuffle is resurrected. You know it was ugly when it took an absolutely unforgivable 51 fucking minutes for the motherf***ers moderators to bring up one policy issue(!?!). You know it was shameful when Keith Olbermann sez "The campaign may have seemed dirty. It had nothing on one of the moderators of the debate tonight."

Look, I know Stephanopoulos is ABC's DC bureau chief but he was Bill Clinton's senior political advisor and communications director fer chrissakes.
I don't want to say that George had a hard-on for Obama but he should have put a coat on to cover his naked bias. Fox's Hugh Hewitt would have been a more appropriate choice. Is Charles Gibson really so light that he couldn't have moderated solo?

The only good to come out of this unmitigated disaster is that every single debate henceforth will seem amaaazing.

-AF
++Update: Harper's Ken Silverstein provides one-stop shopping with Deep Throats: A Compilation of Debate Porn.

Iraqis Speak On Our Invasion's Fifth Anniversay

This is powerful stuff. The normally unflappable Charlie Rose gets flapped.











Glenn Greenwald on What can and cannot be spoken on television:

The significance of the interview lies as much in what it says about the American occupation of Iraq as it what it illustrates about the American media. In the American media's discussions of Iraq, when are the perspectives expressed here about our ongoing occupation -- views extremely common among Iraqis of all types and grounded in clear, indisputable facts -- ever heard by the average American news consumer? The answer is: "virtually never."

Rose was as adversarial and argumentative -- angry, even -- as he ever gets with anyone, because he plainly did not anticipate, and did not like, that he was being exposed to such hostility towards our Freedom-spreading, Liberty-loving Liberation of the grateful, lucky (dead and displaced) Iraqi people.

Crooks And Liars has the Charlie Rose footage here. Note that previously for his Fifth Anniversary "celebration," Rose touted that he would have "conversations to find out how both critics and supporters of the war effort see the current situation." Chuckle's concept of Iraq War "critics" is seriously warped. Earlier this week, Greenwald ripped Rose's "panel of experts":

The two alleged "war critics" were the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lesley Gelb, and The New Yorker's George Packer. As Rose put it: "To get the other side's perspective, I talked to Richard Perle and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute." And therein one finds a perfect expression of how limited, distorted and propagandistic the debate over Iraq in the establishment press continues to be.

In no meaningful sense are Gelb and Packer on "the other side" from Perle and Kagan. Both Gelb and Packer were, albeit to different degrees, among the most influential enablers of the invasion of Iraq.

In February, 2003, Gelb went on Fox News with Brit Hume and attacked the French for impeding our invasion, telling Hume (via LEXIS): "But frankly, except for The Cuban Missile Crisis, I don't think more has been at stake than today. Our country really is at risk in a way we've never been at risk before." Three days before the invasion, he told The Associated Press: "I'm in favor of this . . . . It's the best medicine for anti-Americanism around the world I can imagine." To this day, Gelb continues to insist that the invasion was the right thing to do, but that we just should have executed it more effectively. So that's one of Rose's "war critics."

While much more nuanced and cautious than Gelb, Packer was one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called "liberal hawk" movement. He wrote a highly influential December, 2002 New York Times article proclaiming "The Liberal Quandry over Iraq," touting the views of so-called "liberal hawks." The next month, he demanded "a clean break" with what he scorned as "doctrinaire leftists, who know what they think about American foreign policy -- they're against it," and rejected "an antiwar movement with little to say to Americans' fears for their own safety."

Packer never endorsed Bush's specific invasion plan, but he certainly never opposed it, and -- like most "liberal hawks" -- endorsed the concept itself ("the wrong people are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons"). Packer perfectly exemplified the Tom-Friedman-esque "liberal hawk" enabling behavior back then of advocating American interventionism of the type contemplated in Iraq (while wishing it would be better executed) and attacking those who were genuinely opposed to the war ("Until liberals show that they will make the world safe for democracy -- for their fellow citizens, and for citizens around the world -- the American people won't give them the chance").

No wonder Rose was completely unprepared for the Iraqi side of the story. The phrase Rose-coloured glasses comes immediately to mind.

-AF