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

DOWNLOADS: (1130)

PLAYS: (2665)

The FOX News gasbags were all up in arms over the Dowd column and hey, you can always count on the All Stars to justify all wingnut behavior, no matter how hideous it is.

I can't believe Maureen Dowd's column garnered this much attention, but it has and is forcing Fox to try and dispel the charges of racism. Stephen Hayes should look at the background of Joe Wilson before he says it's disgusting to bring race into his outburst. Mr. Confederate flag was only showing his true colors.

Transcript via an email from Bob Fertik:

Bret Baier: Don't you have to be careful when you level the charge?
It's such a blunt object, when you say "racism" is a big charge.

Stephen Hayes: There is absolutely zero evidence that saying You Lied to the President of the United States had anything to do with race whatsoever and it is a disgusting smear for anybody to suggest that.

It is a sad day when a columnist in the NY Times can just imagine that
somebody is saying something, literally putting words in her mouth. She
prefaced the statement by saying "fair or not I heard him say 'You Lied
Boy.'" That's not fair. As a journalist, you can't imagine people saying things, you have to criticize them based on what they actually say and he didn't say this ...

Krauthammer: The accusation of racism is a sign of desperation by
people who know they are losing the national debate and they want to hurl the ultimate charge in American politics.

This is dealing from the bottom of the deck and I agree that it is a
disgusting tactic. It's done as a way to end debate. The minute you call someone a racist the debate is over, you don't continue. Accusations of racism are the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.

As for Maureen Dowd imagining a word that wasn't said, in my previous
profession I saw a lot of people who heard words that weren't said. They were called patients and many of them were helped with medication. The reason she won't be and others who are hurling the accusation is because it's a deliberate attempt to change the subject and discredit the opposition with unprovable and unproved ad hominem.

Juan Williams is pretty useless as usual. However, he did manage to knock down Bret Baier's stupid attempt to find equivalency between the people who questioned George W. Bush's legitimacy -- who did so for legitimate reasons, considering Bush actually garnered fewer votes than Al Gore -- and the "Birthers" and other conspiracy theorists attempting to undermine Obama's.

But the whole discussion was a classic Village exercise in self-protection. If you're not seeing racism on display in this country now then, you're not looking very hard.

Yes, some of the protests are by right wing Americans who didn't vote for Obama, but there are far too many zealots seriously going bonkers over the race issue. Let's face it: All these Nazi and Hitler signs are a way to be racist, but without putting color into the mix. It's just as odious, I might add.

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

DOWNLOADS: (1359)

PLAYS: (4068)

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told CNN's John King that President Barack Obama doesn't believe people are protesting him because he is a black man. "I don't think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin," said Gibbs.

In her Sunday column, Maureen Dowd said that race is playing a part in the vocal opposition to Obama.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

John Amato:

While Dowd writes some of the most insane stuff I've seen, she does mix in some truths as well and I'm surprised she makes this observation. It's apparent to anybody that has eyes in their skulls what's been going on. There is a large amount of people in this country that do not like President Obama because he's black. Just watch the news once in a while or do some reading. Don't ever expect Gibbs or anyone in the White House to say this publicly because the media would go crazy over this, but we know it's true. And the conservative movement has been hijacked by the crazies even before Clinton took office. It's not a new phenomenon. What is shocking is to see the hatred on display so out in the open and being encouraged by the media. Glenn Greenwald takes up the case in his post: Is the Right's attack on Obama's legitimacy new or unprecedented?

This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly "hijacked" by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks. And the crazed conspiracy-mongers in that movement became even more prominent during the Bush years. Frum himself -- now parading around as the Serious Adult conservative -- wrote, along with uber-extremist Richard Perle, one of the most deranged and reality-detached books of the last two decades, and before that, celebrated George W. Bush, his former boss, as "The Right Man."

Bob Somerby continues on and writes:

By the summer of Clinton’s second year in office, two active attempts were made on his life. One guy even flew a small plane into the White House, apparently trying to kill him. Colbert King doesn’t seem to remember. Might we suggest why that is?

You see, King is part of a media “elite” which enabled—or encouraged—the lunatic claims against Clinton, then Gore. Perhaps for that reason, people like King have airbrushed that decade—and they express their vast surprise when the same thing is done to Obama. Meanwhile, King name-calls two minor crackpot pastors—and forgets to name the powerful players who are vastly more responsible for the lunatic claims against Obama.

King is brave when it comes to naming no-names. Where are the names of the powerful players who have really been driving this lunacy?

Somehow, when it comes to such names, people like King seem to get light-headed. They may feel their knees start to buckle.

There have always been local lunatics like Anderson and Drake in our politics. But the movement went national in the 1980s, when Rush Limbaugh moved to New York. King has criticized Limbaugh a few times—in the last year, that is. But Limbaugh drove the lunatic hatred against the last Democratic president (Hillary Clinton helped kill Vince Foster!)—and King never mentioned his name, not once, during that whole brainless era. (Nexis archives.)

King openly criticized Jerry Falwell—after the 9/11 attacks, that is. But Falwell’s name never appeared in his column during the 1990s, when he pimped those murder claims all around. Somehow, King failed to notice that ugliness. Or perhaps he was too scared to speak.

Like the bulk of his weak, weak-minded cohort, King failed to act in the 1990s. This morning, he seems to have forgotten that the decade happened at all.

Might we make a long story short? King and his cohort bought all the crap against the last Democratic president. Some of them actively encouraged the hatred; some of them simply enabled it. But by October 2000, King could barely bring himself to say a word in favor of Candidate Gore. To recall the pained column in which King made himself say that Gore would probably be somewhat better than Bush, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/26/09. In that column, you see how thoroughly these weak-minded people failed you in the last decade.

King and there rest of his cohort drank the Kool-Aid during that decade—gulped it lovingly down. Now, they pretend that the era never occurred—and they express their vast surprise when the same lunacy is aimed at Obama. They are amazed to see what’s being said about this new Democratic president. And they diddle their cowardly brains: It must be his race, they proclaim.

In this way, people like King refuse to tell the real story. Here it is:

Your discourse has been this way for decades. A powerful movement generates ludicrous claims against all major Democrats. They did it to Clinton, then to Gore—with King’s blessing. Now, it’s being done to Obama.

So far, no one has flown a small plane into the White House. But in the past, it was tried.

King ran off and hid in the woods while this was being done the last time. (He was still bad-mouthing Hillary Clinton in the familiar old ways as late as summer 2008.) Now he pretends it just didn’t happen. And he makes it hard for liberals to argue the truth—to help the public see the big picture about our devolving culture.

This isn’t about unfortunate nuts like Pastor Anderson. It isn’t about an unfortunate nut like Drake, who at least is an equal opportunity kook. (He also wished divine retribution on Pastor Rick Warren this year.)

This is really about the names—and the movement—which don’t appear in King’s column. It’s about multimillionaire stooges like Limbaugh and Hannity—and so many others like them. It’s about Charles Grassley—and Sarah Palin. It’s about the astonishing Betsy McCaughey, the “misleader-in-chief” from 1994 who still can’t seem to get herself profiled in Colbert King’s weak-kneed newspaper.

When it comes to the establishment Washington Post, the fake McCoys can’t get arrested.

Uh-oh! Charles Grassley is an accepted figure in Establishment Washington. Voters deserve to hear what he’s done. But Colbert King won’t say his name. To this day, he never has.

It's been going on for years and the media elites are terrified to ever say a word about it and this blatant deep seeded hatred will continue for many more decades unless the media doesn't act the cowards they have been for all these years and expose the nuts and stop promoting their insanity for ratings. Someone is going to get hurt and very soon.
I think Dr. Tiller and his family have already paid the ultimate price, don't you?

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

DOWNLOADS: (105)

PLAYS: (237)

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Maureen Dowd about her column at the New York Times on Bill Clinton brokering the return of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, titled "Let the Big Dog Run". Dowd turns the interview into another episode of beltway Villager Clenis obsession and says that her favorite part of all this was the New York Post headline "Bubba Gets the Chicks".

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

DOWNLOADS: (2352)

PLAYS: (2293)

Gee, Karl Rove seems to have taken umbrage at Maureen Dowd's latest column. Especially this part:

So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world. ...

What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.

Responded Rove, yesterday on Fox:

Rove: I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for the New York Times, who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for anybody on the conservative side of the aisle.

I actually went to an editorial board meeting at the New York Times and wasted a couple of bucks on some flowers to give Maureen Dowd at the meeting, so that it would give her a smile on her face, and that didn't even work. This is a dour, downbeat liberal. And, uh, it was an entertaining piece, I frankly agree with her that President Obama's entitled to go to New York and entertain his wife. I suspect I would have done it maybe just a little bit later in the year than now. But he's entitled. You do not want a president who feels confined in the bubble.

But why she felt so compelled to go out and trash somebody who did our country a great service for eight years and handled himself in an admirable fashion is just typical of Maureen Dowd's twisted, bitter little heart.

Well, I customarily don't find myself in the position of defending Maureen Dowd, but she was of course quite right. She's not merely trashing George W. Bush -- she's demonstrating the laughable falsity of Rove's claim that Bush was "someone who did our country a great service" (yeah, if by "service" you mean the agricultural kind) and "handled himself in an admirable fashion" (other than that whole running-the-country-off-a-cliff thing).

Being asleep at the wheel at 9/11, talking the country into invading another under false pretenses, sleepwalking through Katrina, inducing the greatest economic crisis since the Depression: Not exactly what I'd call "great service" or "admirable," would you?

Rove goes on to talk about how leaderless the Republicans are these days. Somehow, what goes unmentioned is the great damage his administration did to his party. Of course.

Men may not be necessary to Maureen Dowd, but a professional ethicist appears to be.
TPM:

Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

TPM's Josh Marshall on Thurs:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Almost verbatim. Look, we bloggers take shortcuts and copy and paste others all the time. I do it because there are a whole host of people out there who write better than I. But we GIVE CREDIT when we do it, as I did above when acknowledging that this post came from TPM. For a Pulitzer Prize winner to lift work done by bloggers and pass it off as her own on the pages of the NY Times is just not cool.

UPDATE: MoDo admits to HuffPo that she lifted the words and will give Josh Marshall proper credit...but I'm puzzled by her alibi:

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?

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

DOWNLOADS: (114)

PLAYS: (353)

Poor little old Dick Cheney just can't catch a break. It seems we've now got Maureen Dowd and former President Bill Clinton taking shots at Dick Cheney after Lawrence Wilkerson's righteous smack down. Ed Gillespie is the former Bush aide du jour that gets the honors of defending Darth Cheney on The Situation Room. Gillespie doesn't want to acknowledge that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk don't want any moderates in his response to Blitzer.

And I'm sorry but the Democratic Party has not moved to the left. We've got a moderate for a President that a lot of us on the left don't agree with on many issues and a whole bunch of corporate-crats who did as Gillespie correctly noted get elected in conservative districts. How that makes the party moving to the left in anything but Republican fantasy land is beyond me. Ed needs to work on his talking points. He sounds like he's still beating that "Obama is the most liberal Senator" dead horse that failed them the last election and hoping their tired "socialist" canard sticks.

BLITZER: All right, let's talk about the former Vice President Dick Cheney for a moment.

Maureen Dowd, "The New York Times" columnist, Ed, who wrote this in the paper today: "Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as rogue diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing."

Is this whole debate among Republicans right now, who's more beneficial to the party, Colin Powell or Rush Limbaugh, is this really helpful to the Republicans? And I ask you as a former chairman of the RNC.

GILLESPIE: No, it's a false debate, Wolf.

The fact is that, if you're going to be a majority party in a country of 300 million people, you're a party that would include people who have a view of -- like Rush Limbaugh, very pure in terms of the philosophical approach, and a view that accommodates people like Colin Powell as well, a little bit more pragmatic in terms of their approach.

I -- you know, I am someone who is, you know, a conservative in terms of my philosophy and my -- my political outlook, but I also am someone who understands that the Democrats have done a very good job of getting candidates in districts where maybe the -- the candidate doesn't agree, the Democratic candidate doesn't agree with the Democratic Party platform on gun control or on abortion.

But, at the same time, they have been able to elect enough candidates to get a majority. I would say, in the -- that process, by the way, the Democratic Party hasn't moved to the right. If anything, it's moved left.

BLITZER: All right.

GILLESPIE: And, so, I think that we should take a page from their playbook.

BLITZER: The former President Bill Clinton was out campaigning for the Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, his good friend. He was out in Herndon, Virginia.

And we caught up with him, Bill Clinton.

Donna, listen to this little reaction we got from him on the whole Dick Cheney business.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: I wish him well. It's over.

I wish him well. It's over. But I do hope he gets some more target practice before he goes out again.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: "I do hope he gets some more target practice before he goes out again."

All right, what do you make of that, given the -- I guess it's the implication of the -- the shooting incident when he went out hunting a few years ago, shot a friend in the face.

BRAZILE: Well, I also think the former president was referring to the fact that the former vice president this past weekend made, I thought, an incredible mistake in saying that he would pick one over the other, pick Limbaugh over Colin Powell.

Ed knows this very well. In order for a major political party to survive in the kind of country we live in, you need to have, you know, diversity within your party, a more inclusive party.

I think Dick Cheney is a distraction for the Republican Party as they try to rebrand themselves, reinvent themselves, and to connect with the American people on the values that most Americans care about.

So, it's not always left vs. right. It's right vs. wrong. And the American people have judged the Republicans to be wrong on the issues.

BLITZER: All right, guys, we will leave it there.

Donna and Ed, thanks very much. We will continue, though. Both of you will be back.

DOWNLOAD (16)

PLAY (55)

Ah, Maureen! You're always just a little bit behind the parade, aren't you?

Maureen Dowd is thrilled DC is "finally integrated." To celebrate, the Times columnist made an A-list nightclub of her home then dined like French aristocracy.

Dowd bragged to MSNBC that Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen couldn't get into her big inauguration party last night. She's a celebrity! A crowd gathered behind her during the MSNBC interview, because, the cable network dubiously claimed, members recognized the columnist and were fans, apparently enamored of Dowd's pointless pop-culture references and tired arch emasculation of various male liberals.

Anyway, Dowd said she's very happy about racial discord ending forever — she grew up with black people, you know — so she drank champagne and ate croissants at the Lincoln Memorial, in celebration of DC being integrated. What? Why would Dowd tell this story? Is she trying to parody herself? On peyote? Off of Ritalin?

In another bizarre, self-undermining statement, Dowd said she would go easier on Obama than on Bush, but implied this was only because she was terrified the diverse crowd behind her would tear the columnist limb from limb.

Not only is she the new voice of race relations, she's also doing her part to bring the Times back to fiscal stability. But if the New York Times were my paper and I was trying to stay afloat, I think the last person I'd want to keep on is the person who spends my money on half-assed trend stories:

I didn't see this piece, but my friend Cos (who worked as a reporter with me) pointed it out the other day. "The New York Times is going out of business, but they send Maureen Dowd and her buddy to a spa?" she said, pointedly.

To be honest, I forgot about it (I tend to put anything having to do with Maureen Dowd out of my usable memory) until Dr. S. (another recovering reporter) just sent me this:

Carlos Slim or no Carlos Slim, these are lean times at The New York Times. On Friday, the paper handed down new, tighter guidelines for employee expenses. Among the new strictures: a $50-per-head limit on meals and an end to reimbursement for entertaining fellow Times colleagues.

So there was predictable outrage after op-ed star Maureen Dowd published a travel piece yesterday about her weekend spent scoping the scene at a new high-end spa in Miami. Dowd and another Times writer, TV critic Alessandra Stanley, spent a few day getting massages and detoxifying -- taking time out to have dinner with the city's chief of police at a swanky private club -- ostensibly in the name of researching whether the down economy is causing "spa guilt" among the well-to-do.

Did Dowd really manage to get the paper to pay for several thousand dollars worth of pampering just as her coworkers were being told to cut back? (Times ethics policies strictly prohibit employees from accepting comped meals or lodgings, or from letting their guests pick up the tab, especially if they're government officials.) Dowd's assistant said the columnist had "paid her own way, totally."* But a Times spokeswoman, asked about the story, framed it differently:

When our restaurant reviewer goes to a high-end restaurant, The Times pays and the limits on expenses are not applicable. The same is true with the expenses associated with Ms. Dowd's story. The visit and the payments were properly handled within our policies.

Update, 1.20.09: Dowd's assistant clarifies: Dowd paid her her own way out of pocket initially but will have her expenses reimbursed by the paper.

The media, they are so very different from you and me! (And if I were one of Maureen's co-workers, I'd respond with that traditional newsroom inquiry: "Who'd she do to get that?") More reactions here and here.

By Maureen Dowd

Hoooo-rah! Rummy finally got called on the carpet.

Not by the president, of course, but by troops fighting in Iraq. Some of them are finally fed up enough to rumble about his back-door draft and failure to provide them with the proper armor for their Humvees, leaving them scrambling to improvise with what they call "hillbilly...

As Joe Biden told Aaron Brown of CNN about his visit to Falluja, "They got the biggest hornets' nest, but the hornets have gone up and set up nests other places." He said that a general had run up to him as he was getting into his helicopter to confide, "Senator, anybody who tells you we don't need forces here is a G.D. liar."

In one of his glib "Nothing's perfect," "Freedom's untidy" and "Stuff happens" maxims, Rummy told the soldier: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have."...

The dreams of Rummy and the neocons were bound to collide. But it's immoral to trap our troops in a guerrilla war without essential, lifesaving support and matériel just so a bunch of officials who have never been in a war can test their theories.

Maureen Dowd continues her Pulitzer Prize-winning writing:

Kerry: Slo-Mo on Swifties

By MAUREEN DOWD

It's easy for the Bushes to stay gallant. They delegate the gutter.

There are always third-party political assassins, ostensibly independent, to do the dynasty wet work.

W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival.

Full Article

It makes sense for W. to use surrogates to do his fighting, just as he did when he slid out of Vietnam and just as he did when he sent our troops to fight his administration's misbegotten vanity war in Iraq.