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John Amato and I frequently Monday morning quarterback the news shows and the pundits invited on to represent the "left" side of the conversation. Most of the time, I'll admit, we're puzzled by how that particular person is considered on the left (Joke Line, I'm looking at you). John has done some media training and I'm just dipping my toes into the media appearances (you can hear my segment discussing the Sunday shows on The Nicole Sandler Show live every Monday at www.radioornot.com or check out the podcasts) because we both feel so passionately that we need strong, unapologetic liberal voices out there to pierce through the right wing noise.

So I'm thrilled that we're seeing high visibility liberals like Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas on This Week on a semi-regular basis. For years, it wouldn't have happened.

But after watching this clip, the substance of which Heather discussed on Sunday, I want to speak to a fatal flaw in appearances like Arianna's and Markos's.

As I expected, both of them did their homework and were armed with facts to support their side. That's what we do: we present facts and hope that the other side will observe the rules of debate. But look who they were debating. Do you honestly think that Liz Cheney is going to argue fairly? Of course not. She lies right in the faces of Markos and Arianna (and more importantly, the viewer who may not have those facts in hand) when she says it's absolutely not true that Halliburton was fined millions of dollars for defrauding the federal government. Note how Arianna laughingly says she can't wait for Politifact (a supposedly non-partisan fact-check organization through the St Petersburg Times) for their verdict on her factual accuracy. As of this writing, more than 36 hours from the broadcast, and Politifact has remained suspiciously silent on Liz Cheney, but only too happy to go after Markos for a slip of the tongue that he immediately acknowledged afterward.

So clearly, having the grasp of the facts and/or counting on the anchor/fact check organization to expect truthfulness from their guests doesn't work. Nor does expecting Liz Cheney and George Will to be fair, and not dismissive, as they trot out the strawman that liberals even blame the demise of the Gore marriage on Bush, something Liz Cheney thinks she read on Daily Kos. All snide insinuations to dismiss, belittle and render non-credible everything else they say.

Well, liberals, let me tell you right now: It's time to put away those Marquess of Queensbury rules. Stop smiling as they lie to your face. But don't get caught in some distraction (the last vestige of a Republican scoundrel: focus on some picayune aspect and steer the conversation away from anything of substance for which they have no defense). Keep hold of your head, your calm and your facts and cut them off at the knees, rhetorically speaking.

There's no reason, for example, why Liz "Spawn of Satan" Cheney should have any credibility to appear on these shows. She is a veteran of an administration widely considered the worst in modern history and of the department that pushed a foreign policy that has failed us, at the cost of thousands of American deaths, tens of thousands of devastating injuries and one trillion dollars of American taxpayer money. Her latest gig is at the head of a think tank formed with another neo-conservative (Bill "I'm always wrong" Kristol) to push a failed foreign policy that has been soundly rejected by the American people and to throw as much crap at our current president to see what sticks. That's it: she is on TV to push for more destruction. Why the hell aren't we impeaching her credibility by pointing out this FACTUAL information?

C'mon, Markos and Arianna, she's done nothing to earn your (or the audience's) respect. She feels no compunction about belittling you on air. Stop being polite. Be honest. And make that torture-apologist, war-mongering shrew and her partisan-motivated propaganda talking points radioactive on these shows.

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I keep talking to people about this, and they keep responding, "Oh, Obama probably did it because they don't have enough evidence to win in civilian court." And that's not true, and it's not even the point. The point is, George W. Bush pushed the dangerous idea that the 9/11 attacks were acts of terror by states, not individuals - and that was the rationale for invading Iraq. Trying the 9/11 attackers in military tribunals is saying the Bush-Cheney doctrine was right, and lays the groundwork for bipartisan support of pre-emptive attacks:

The Justice Department's restoration was among the most important tasks facing the Obama administration: The Bush administration's political appointees had dismantled the hiring practices that allowed career attorneys to make hiring decisions, and gave more weight to ideological conformity than legal expertise. The result was a Justice Department where incompetent ideologues with political interests in mind were given more power than career attorneys concerned with upholding the law. Michael Mukasey began the process of de-politicizing Justice after he replaced Alberto Gonzales; Eric Holder has continued it.

In light of this, I think Andrew Sullivan's observation of the conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Holder over the prosecution of the alleged September 11 conspirators is especially important:

But whatever your view, this must not, it seems to me, be a politicized decision. It should be a matter of justice. And to go from a Rove-driven Justice Department to an Emanuel-driven Justice Department is not the change most of us who supported Obama wanted to see. Or believe in.

I'm not interested in going from a Justice Department whose behavior is driven by Republican political interests to one whose behavior is driven by Democratic political interests. That's going nowhere at all. Retreating on the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court won't undo all the important changes the administration has made to the Justice Department, but it would reinforce the idea that the Department is a political fiefdom rather than an entity that exists to enforce the laws of the United States and secure the rights of its citizens.

A separate point is that Republicans won't budge on Gitmo anyway, no matter what Lindsey Graham says, so Emanuel's choice isn't even smart politics.

Wouldn't you like to see a host who really knows the topics take a shot at running ABC's THIS WEEK for once? ABC is using a former Bushie Matthew Dowd as a host this Sunday:

Matthew Dowd, who worked as chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, is getting a shot behind the anchor desk on ABC's “This Week."

Since news broke that George Stephanopoulos was heading to “Good Morning America” in December, the network has had five different fill-in hosts while deciding who’ll get the job permanently: Jake Tapper, Terry Moran, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Karl and Elizabeth Vargas.

Still, Dowd—who has been an ABC political contributor since 2007, and regular on the Sunday roundtable—will be the first non-journalist to have a chance asking the questions. Dowd's just scheduled for this week, as the network continues looking for a permanent host.

Pretty soon they'll be trying out right-wing talk show hosts. I think it's time Stewart gets a shot to host the Sunday show. Hey, he may not want to do it, but he's not afraid to step into the political arena and duke it out, so why not give this one a try? I bet you'll see somebody that would have a clear understanding of the issues and not be worried about protecting his Villager image with the rest of the Beltway elites.

It would be a ratings bonanza for ABC as well.

We want Jon Stewart to host ABC's THIS WEEK.

You can email ABC here.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Barack Obama has been in the fast lane when it comes to bipartisanship. Now one year into his presidency, his near-pathological obsession with consensus has only served to resurrect a moribund GOP while leaving his agenda and his own party teetering on the brink.

It didn't have to be this way. Not if Barack Obama had understood Krugman's Law and heeded the lessons of Dick Cheney.

Listened to Cheney, that is, not on national security, but on domestic politics.

Following the disputed 2000 election, the Bush-Cheney transition team prepared to assume the White House without either a popular vote mandate or dominant majorities in Congress. But while the mainstream media consensus concluded that a "weakened" President Bush would have to govern from the center and "build bridges to the opposition," Dick Cheney had a different idea. Especially when it came to the Republican ticket's radical plan of tax cuts for the economy, Cheney insisted:

"We don't negotiate with ourselves."

As Barton Gellman details in his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Dick Cheney made it abundantly clear that the Bush administration would put pedal to the metal in pursuit of its radical agenda. In a series of media appearances that December, Cheney proceeded as if the Florida recount and Bush v. Gore had never happened.

His December 3, 2000 exchange with the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press is particularly telling:

RUSSERT: Governor Bush and you campaigned on a platform of a $1.3 trillion tax cut. Now that the Senate is 50-50, Democrats-Republicans, and the Republicans control the House by eight or nine votes, won't you have to scale down your tax cut in order to pass it? [...] But, in reality, with a 50-50 Senate and a close, close, small majority in the House, you're going to have to have a moderate, mainstream, centrist governance, aren't you?

CHENEY: Oh, I think so. [...] But I think there's no reason in the world why we can't do exactly what Governor Bush campaigned on.

Two weeks later, following the controversial Supreme Court decision which made George W. Bush the 43rd President, Cheney made his case even more forcefully on Face the Nation:

"As President-elect Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed. It's his program, it's his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It's why we got elected.

So we're going to aggressively pursue tax changes, tax reform, tax cuts, because it's important to do so. [...] The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs, I just think is silly."

When Gloria Borger interrupted to object that "with all due respect, the Democrats are saying that this administration cannot proceed as the Reagan administration did, for example, with a large tax bill, because you don't have the mandate that a Ronald Reagan.," Cheney fired back:

"There is no reason in the world, and I simply don't buy the notion, that somehow we come to office now as a, quote, 'weakened president.' [...] We've got a good program, and we're going to pursue it."

Which is exactly what transpired. By May 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had their $1.35 trillion tax cut, courtesy of precisely the strategy Borger ridiculed as " cherry pick[ing] one or two Democrats here and there and get them to sign on to whatever tax bill you have."

But eight years later, Barack Obama did not follow the Bush-Cheney example.

As it turned out, the deadly combination of Obama's hands-off approach to legislation and unending appeasement of Republicans determined to destroy him was both futile and counterproductive.

Continue reading »

This is certainly good news. I don't know if it has a snowball's chance in hell of passing, but you never know:

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) announced today that they will introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act, which eliminates retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

“I believe we best defend America when we also defend its founding principles,” said Dodd. “We make our nation safer when we eliminate the false choice between liberty and security. But by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who may have participated in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, the Congress violated the protection of our citizen’s privacy and due process right and we must not allow that to stand.”

Senator Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “Last year, I opposed legislation that stripped Americans of their right to seek accountability for the Bush administration’s decision to illegally wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Today, I am pleased to join Senator Dodd to introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act. We can strengthen national security while protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. Restoring Americans’ access to the courts is the first step toward bringing some measure of accountability for the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to conduct warrantless surveillance in violation of our laws.”

“Granting retroactive immunity to companies that went along with the illegal warrantless wiretapping program was unjustified and undermined the rule of law,” Feingold said. “Congress should not have short-circuited the courts’ constitutional role in assessing the legality of the program. This bill is about ensuring that the law is followed and providing accountability for the American people.”

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Robert Novak died today of brain cancer.

Novak will perhaps be best remembered -- if at all -- as one of the most compulsive professional liars to have wormed his way inside the Beltway, and that's saying something. And when it came to the interference he ran to protect the Bush-Cheney administration -- culminating in his central role in the Valerie Plame affair -- and his resulting efforts to cover his tracks, it even had historic proportions. Novak himself had constantly lied about this role, and was fond of accusing the people uncovering his tracks of lying. (See Marcy's authoritative work on Novak for more.)

Unsurprisingly, his friends are now eager to make us all forget this. Tim Carney's remembrance omits any mention of it whatsoever. And then there was Fred Barnes on Fox this morning, who simply followed in his friend's footsteps and flatly lied about the Plame case:

Barnes: Bob -- you know, Bob was unruffled by the whole thing. He had to get a lawyer, but, ah, you know, it was no problem to him.

Of course, it turned out that he was the first one to hear from anybody in the Bush administration about Valerie Plame, uhm, being a part, and her husband, you know, helping her husband get this, go to this trip to Africa, and then say that President Bush had -- what President Bush had said about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Africa was wrong.

They're still discussing it. It turns out that President Bush was right.

But anyway, Bob was caught up in this scandal, he'd heard about it first, and reported it in his column, and then was perfectly comfortable being the center of attention in a legal case that went on for years and years.

WTF? It's long been an established fact that Novak's reportage was wrong, and in fact was just a propaganda-driven smear on behalf of the Bush administration, since Plame in fact had nothing to do with Joe Wilson getting the Niger assignment. (George Tenet himself explained: "Mid-level officials in CPD [The CIA’s Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division] decided on their own initiative to [ask Joe Wilson to look into the Niger issue because] he'd helped them on a project once before, and he'd be easy to contact because his wife worked in CPD.")

And since when has it "turned out" that "Bush was right" about the Niger yellowcake? Not only was the report on which he based the claim he made in the State of the Union built from set of hoax documents, but the White House ignored warnings that this was likely the case. Moreover, there has been no subsequent evidence to suggest that Saddam indeed sought yellowcake from Niger.

Ah, but such things as facts and truthfulness matter little to people like Robert Novak and Fred Barnes. All they care about is covering their tracks. Lying is what they do, right up to their final breaths.

Pissedonpolitics.com: "The Militant Islamic Bush Cheney Administration" shows Pickles in her terr'ist outfit and Dubya's face worn reverently on the hindquarters of brown people. On topic, many of us bloggers are following Sully's lead in taking up the middle name of "Hussein" just for fun. (h/t Uncommon Sense). Signed, Blue Hussein Gal.

Open Thread below.

Bush-Cheney Ad

Bush Cheney Touching Your Life.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -Real Audio

OneGoodMove has the QT version.

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Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, they played the video ad cooked up by Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" outfit attacking President Obama for his supposedly slipshod handling of the Underwear Bomber and his slow response while on vacation.

O'Reilly thought the ad was just cracker jack, calling it "devastating." Yeah, devastatingly hypocritical.

Jane Skinner was there to provide some kind of pushback, I guess, and she managed to at least point out that maybe turning the national response to terrorism into a partisan political is not really in the public's best interest. Of course, some of us pointed that out eight years ago, too, but no one listened then, either.

But utterly unmentioned was the fact that, when faced with identical circumstances in 2001, the Bush administration waited six days before responding publicly. Indeed, ignoring this fact is part of the new double standard when talking terrorism: Whatever Bush-Cheney did was right, whatever Obama does is wrong.

This is part of the steady drumbeat of fearmongering we've been getting from the Cheney crowd since the election, and the media -- outside of Rachel Maddow and the left blogosphere -- is letting them get away with it.

More importantly, they are obliterating from public view the fact that Bush’s post-9/11 anti-terrorism policies in toto made us less safe, because they intensified the conditions that lead to terrorist recruitment. This was enunciated clearly by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, which "found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."

Some prime recent examples include the recent attack on the CIA base in Afghanistan, in which the perpetrator's wife claimed he had been radicalized by the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Finally, there’s Cheney’s unmentioned (on Fox, at least) role in the release of the two men who founded Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

It’s almost as if Bush-Cheney intentionally sabotaged the incoming administration by ensuring future terrorist attacks. Indeed, that question has been raised.

Even more disgusting is that these same connivers are trying to lay the blame for the evil fruits of their malfeasance on the back of the man elected to clean up their mess.