You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1252)

PLAYS: (2157)

I'd like to know why the producers of This Week thought it was necessary to bring Laura Ingraham on the show to defend Fox News? She had about as much to add to the conversation as Michelle Malkin did not long ago. The rest of the Villagers did a pretty good job of circling the wagons around Fox whether the likes of Ingraham was there or not. Ingraham's hackery became even too much for the rest of them to take when she started comparing the White House's view of Fox to that of "Islamic Jihadists".

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now the president did cancel the subscription, George, but then he kind of blew it off. Is it time now as President Obama faces down FOX News down for a JFK moment?

WILL: I think so. Look, no president in the history of this republic has less reason to complain about his treatment in the press than President Obama. Liberals have academic, they have a mainstream media, they have Hollywood. They’re all for diversity and everything but thought. And out here is this one channel, FOX, and they’re all up in arms because in the words of Ms. Dunn of the White House, it is opinion journalism masquerading as news, which some of us would say describes the “New York Times” and certainly MSNBC.

PODESTA: Well, we have partners in journalism in America for a couple hundred years. But I think FOX takes it a little bit to a different level. I think Bill Shein, the vice president for news at FOX came out and said, “We are the opposition.” You know, that I think, can you imagine David Westin going out and saying something like that? Anybody, really in the mainstream news organization, they’re organizing. And I think it seems to me they were overcome with that feeling of joy you get from telling the truth once in a while. And probably they may actually even regret going as far as they have.

INGRAHAM: Well as the FOX representative on this show, by the way, you’re all going to be banned from any future White House events from having me at this table.

Bill Shein said that and I know him well. He said that, because he believes that of all the networks, FOX was going to hold the administration the most accountable. Last time I checked, I thought that was the role of the press. I think and again, I might not be invited back George, but when Charlie Gibson didn’t know what the ACORN story was all about, that was a collective gasp you heard across the United States. Charlie Gibson is an esteemed journalist, how do you not know a story about a group where President Obama cut his political teeth that had been exposed to the extent that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were ready to pull the rug out from under them in their funding? That’s the kind of the story that the White House doesn’t want to have reported and repeated on other networks. That’s why they don’t like FOX News.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1900)

PLAYS: (2274)

Well, I guess when Dick Cheney referred to Obama "dithering", he actually meant spending any time thinking about the situation at all, given how little time they spent preparing a report for the incoming administration. CAP's John Podesta points out the problem on This Week:

(Former Bush officials and Republicans) have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward (to criticize Obama's decision process). From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Oh...I see...we're operating on the "shoot first, ask questions later" methodology of foreign policy. Yeah, that's worked so well for us so far.

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does. Imagine--taking a measured, educated and thoughtful approach as to how to deal with the mess that is Afghanistan. What a radical notion after the last eight years.

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers has a piece up on Afghanistan that focuses on why the Bush's gut reaction, no brains technique in Afghanistan has made it impossible to ever "win":

Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.

Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1833)

PLAYS: (3099)

On CNN's "State of the Union" program today, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress took a seemingly middle-of-the-road position on the torture memos: He indicated that he thought pursuing potential prosecutions of the torture-regime architects was a bad idea -- but at the same time, called for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee for his role in authoring them:

Podesta: The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there's a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He's acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.

If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn't, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit -- he doesn't have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.

King: We need to move on, but do your friends at the White House agree with you on this?

Podesta: You'd have to ask them. But I suspect they don't.

The Village may shake its collective finger at Podesta, but this is just the beginning of the effort to remove Bybee. As DDay reports, the California Democratic Party is preparing a resolution calling for his impeachment as well.

Still, it's amazing how the Beltway Villagers -- particularly the political-media pundit class -- seem to have wholly absorbed the Rovean idea that the fight over the torture memos and the calls for investigation are about "revenge" and partisan recrimination, that this is about "criminalizing politics."

That was the entire context of the discussion of the memos in this show, not to mention most of the discussions I've seen on Fox and MSNBC too. It's the context of David Broder's recent blatherings on the subject.

You have to wonder when these people will wake up to the reality that judging these kinds of political endeavors by the ostensibly dark motives of the people behind it is simply blithering nonsense. It's also worth noting that, within the confines of the Village, this kind of judgment is only ever to be raised against liberals and the Left generally. It's "partisan" to do that with the Right, you know (see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment brouhaha).

These are, of course, the same people who dismissed those same Dirty Freaking Hippies when they warned that invading Iraq would turn into a disaster -- because, of course, they only opposed the war out of Bad Motives (i.e., they reflexively hated Bush).

Of course, this narrative -- liberals proceed from knee-jerk, visceral motives -- constantly repeated is also a very comforting and self-serving one for the established classes of the Village. It's also been repeatedly proven wrong -- to very little notice inside the Village.

This isn't about Right and Left. This is about Right and Wrong. Not that the Village would ever get such alien concepts.

DOWNLOAD (61)

PLAY (119)

You'd think that, now that the public is growing increasingly aware that his camera crew stalked a woman blogger from Think Progress on her private vacation to harass her with phony accusations that she had harmed rape victims -- thereby raising serious ethical issues about the behavior of his ambush news crews -- Bill O'Reilly would kind of ease up on that particular story.

But no. He's the biggest inflatable clown in town, by gawd. Nothing he can't blowhard his way around. So he returned to the subject tonight, focusing especially on John Podesta and Think Progress, tying it all in to his favorite new meme about the "liberal smear machine." Much hilarity -- including a segment with Dick "Suck On These" Morris.

Faiz at Think Progress gives the definitive response, and you really should go read it. But I couldn't help noticing a couple of outstanding lines. To wit:

"Alone, they're insects. OK? But they have a relationship within the National Broadcasting Corporation."

Besides the eliminationist quality of referring to other people as insects, O'Reilly produces zero evidence -- beyond Amanda Terkel's appearance on Countdown the night before, which is evidence of nothing other than Amanda's availability to be interviewed -- that there is a "relationship" with NBC. It's pure conjecture on O'Reilly's part. Meanwhile, his claim that Terkel "harmed a rape victim and her family" was flatly false.

Anyway, that was followed shortly by this:

"But I'm not going any further than the facts take me. What I told the audience and what I told you and we just discussed here? 100 percent factual. No conjecture. That's reality."

Faiz adds:

Continue reading »