The wingnuts do get themselves all worked up, don't they?

The fringey-right are upset at the news that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow attended an off-the-record briefing at the White House:

A day after key White House officials declared the Fox News Channel wasn't a news organization, President Obama met with MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Talk about your delicious hypocrisy.

Fittingly, the news was broken by FNC's Bret Baier during Tuesday's "Special Report" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, relevant section at 1:45, h/t Hot Air via NBer Thomas Stewart):

BRET BAIER, HOST: And finally, during this morning's off-camera White House briefing with reporters, ABC's Jake Tapper asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the ongoing White House attacks on FOX News Channel.

After being asked about the charge that FOX isn't a real news organization, Gibbs answered, quote "We render opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness of that coverage."

Tapper: "That's a sweeping declaration that they're not a news organization. How are they different from say, ABC, MSNBC, Univision?"

Gibbs: "You and I should watch around 9:00 tonight or 5:00 this afternoon."

Tapper: "I'm not talking about the opinion programs or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?"

Gibbs: "That is our opinion."

Well, the White House's strong opinions about our opinion shows - - Glenn Beck runs at 5:00 p.m. and Sean Hannity at 9:00 p.m. -- apparently do not extend to similar shows on other networks.

A White House official confirms to us that the audience for Monday's off the record briefing with President Obama included MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Hmmm. So the White House thinks Fox isn't a news organization because it has a perspective, and specifically points fingers at Beck and Hannity.

What does the Adminstration think Olbermann and Maddow have?

I guess it's not a problem for a new organization and its members to have a perspective so long as it's one the White House shares.

They seem to miss the big difference between people like Olbermann and Maddow: They attempt to gather and present facts on their shows. Sometimes they slip up, but it's not usually intentional. Get it?

And they're suffering from memory loss again:

The guest list included Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, and Mike Gallagher. (Rush Limbaugh was unable to attend.) Friday’s off-the-record talk, set for 30 minutes, ended up lasting 90 minutes, where Bush told his guests that the war on terror has to be about right versus wrong, “because if it’s about Christianity versus Islam, we’ll lose.” He also showed them the pistol Saddam Hussein had when he was captured.

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September 30, 2009 CNN-- From The Cafferty File:

It’s been almost six months since the Obama administration lifted the ban on media coverage of the returning caskets of war dead… and the press mostly seems to have lost interest.

“The Examiner” reports how back in April, media outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman… 35 members of the press were at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

For the next returning casket — 17 media outlets showed up… that soon dropped to a dozen. The numbers kept shrinking until this month when only one news outlet was on hand to document the return of a casket bearing the body of a fallen Marine. That was the Associated Press.

In fact, the A-P has made it a point to be there at every arrival of a military casket where the family has granted permission — which is more than half of the time. The AP says it’s their responsibility to cover these returns:

“It’s our belief that this is important, that surely somewhere there is a paper, an audience, a readership, a family and a community for whom this homecoming is indeed news.”

But where are the rest of the media outlets who protested President Bush’s continued ban on showing flag-draped coffins returning to the U.S.?

This is especially troubling in light of what’s going on in Afghanistan. Nearly eight years into that war, 2009 will record the highest death toll.

Conventional wisdom suggests if the American people aren’t seeing the returning war dead — it’s difficult to comprehend the real cost of war.

Here’s my question to you: What does it mean when media coverage of fallen troops’ returning caskets has all but disappeared?

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From The Colbert Report:

If pundits want to save America, they have to do what's wrong to prove they're right.

The talking heads say, Obama must pass a health care reform bill now or his Presidency is over...lol. Stewart rips Dick Morris to shreds in this segment. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

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The unctuous Brian Williams tells Jon Stewart how much he looked up to Walter Cronkite - "He was a man I wanted to be" - and Stewart responds: "How does it feel, to fall so short?"

Smackdown!

Stewart then asks, "Do you think Walter Cronkite would be happy with what he sees in the news now?" Williams says yes, except for ... well, a lot of stuff that Cronkite didn't like about today's news biz.

And really, that's what it's all about, isn't it? All these media types and politicians paying tribute to a man who would absolutely horrify them if he were still alive - and still practicing journalism.

Instead, we have journalism by sound bite, by press release, by chummy relationships and the search for access.

Yes, heroes are much better when they're dead and gone, and not annoying career talking heads who aspire to gravitas without earning it.

From The Onion:

In The Know's new live internet poll feature revolutionizes how pundits shamelessly cater to what viewers want to hear.

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Liz Trotta is shocked, shocked we tell you, at how the Obama White House is managing its press conferences:

Trotta: You know, Eric, we're really witnessing something historic going on with the presidential news conference. President Obama has taken control of it like no other president I've ever seen. By eliminating, for example, the top newspapers, he's really -- which by the way, as you know, which are viewed as the intellectual muscle of the media -- he's managed to show something different. That is, he's going to tailor the questions and the answers to the way he wants them.

Now, there are competing agendas here. The press is supposed to be there to represent the people. The president is there to protect his policies and he wants to be re-elected. But here we are in the middle of a social and and economic revolution, probably the biggest we've had in the country's history, and nobody seems to be able to get a straight answer.

Instead, what we're presented with is preselected questions in a tightly controlled news conference where, at the beginning, the president reads a very self-serving statement from a large movie screen, and then he calls on people, for example, from Univision, and from Stars and Stripes, and from Ebony.

Now, this isn't to say that these people have a right to get a slice of the pie, but let's face it -- the tough questions are going to come from the big guys in media, and I'm talking about mainly newspaper people here, because the television networks certainly haven't covered themselves in glory.

Trotta was promptly corrected about claiming that the questions were preselected, and she admitted this, saying the questioners were preselected instead, and "that is brand new in the history of press conferences."

Bollocks.

The Wall Street Journal tried trotting out a similar claim this week, and Media Matters promptly destroyed it:

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Thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for taking Marc Ambinder out to the woodshed in respect of his shameless stenography, and granting of anonymity, on the Obama administration's weak excuses as they try to justify perpetuating their continuance of Bush's blanket state secret defense.

As Glenn, a lawyer, points out to ( self-confessed Halperin-wannabe) Ambinder:

If, as Obama's Atlantic spokesman claims ... the Obama DOJ needed more time to review what they wanted to do -- then the solution is easy and obvious: you ask the court for more time. You don't march into court and explicitly advocate a Bush weapon that you've spent the last several years excoriating as a dangerous abuse of power.

...the alternative to Bush's lawsuit-killing use of the privilege is not to waive the privilege entirely. Everyone -- including the ACLU -- acknowledges that the Government should have the right to assert the State Secrets privilege on a document-by-document basis. The controversy was and is only about one thing: the use of the privilege to compel the dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance -- in other words, to convert the State Secrets privilege from what it always was (a focused evidentiary privilege) to what it was never intended to be (full-scale immunity for government lawbreakers from all judicial accountability).

...Obama has banned rendition to countries (such as Egypt and Jordan) where torture is likely. If there are still specific rendition agreements that the Obama DOJ thinks are secret and need to be protected, then they can and should assert the privilege as to those documents. That has nothing to do with demanding that the entire lawsuit be dismissed in advance.

As Wizner told me this morning, there is no reason why the ACLU would even need those supposedly secret documents to make their case. Whether the U.S. has rendition agreements with Jordan or Morocco, or what the content of those agreements are, is irrelevant. Besides, other countries -- such as Sweden, which already investigated these claims and fully disclosed their involvement in the CIA's rendition program when awarding the victims compensation -- have already made certain that many of these facts are disclosed.

Them's the facts, unspinnable.

But unfortunately Ambinder is only one among several who seem to be vying to become the next generation of stenographers with access, and thus secure their places among the journalistic elite alongside Thomas Ricks, David Sanger, George Will and Mark Halperin. They know from those previous alumni's examples that the only way to get seriously good insider access is to faithfully copy down and report the news in exactly the way unofficially officials ask them to - no attribution required. They've been called "lapdogs" of democracy rather than the watchdogs they should be, and they are a bipartisan breed.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

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Thomas Ricks on MTP decribes Petraus "lecturing" Obama - and admits the real winner of the war is Iran. Thanks, Heather!

David at C&L Video Cafe has already noted this Sunday how Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, said on Meet The Press that "the surge succeeded militarily, failed politically" but added that "Iraqis, many of them, used the breathing space we created to step backwards to become more sectarian, become more divided." That quick addition is a convenient way to blame only Iraqis for what was widely anticipated before the surge and was put forward as the best reason not to waste more blood and treasure in Bush's sandpit by those that believed Iraqis had to confront their own problems in order to have any motivation to solve them. He also said that Afghanistan is loseable, but Pakistan isn't. (Pakistan being where the US has propped up a two-faced military dictator and lately a two-faced civilian puppet for his generals over the last eight years.)

There's none of that really controversial except to those determined to declaim "mission accomplished" at every opportunity, but in a long article for the WaPo today, Ricks diverges off into revisionist history and at times pure hagiography as he calls General Raymond Odierno the "dissenter who changed the war" and hands Odierno all the credit for thinking up the surge that is such a victory for Ricks - except when he admits it isn't.

Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.

The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.

It's ridiculous cheerleading, mainly sourced to neoconservative and real Surge co-architect Gen. Jack Keane. Over at FDL, emptywheel has a comprehensive takedown of Rick's article, which is an excerpt from Rick's forthcoming book:

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I'm browsing the Washington Post op-ed pages this morning. Let's see: "Revenge of the Tax Code", a column by some guy I never heard of named Chris Edwards which starts out tagging Democratic nominees for their tax problems and turns into a full-court press for... the regressive flat tax! I mean, WTF? But then all becomes clear: Chris Edwards is tax policy director at the Cato Institute!

Then I move on to "Here's How to Make a Real Stimulus Take Flight", a piece by two guys named Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt, in which they explain that the absolute best use of stimulus money would be... to further expand the military! I became suspicious when they started singing the praises of the F-22 Raptor in the dreamy tone most men reserve for talking about their first car. ("A 1968 Dodge Dart, the kind with the slant six engine!")

So I skipped ahead to the end of the column. Sure enough: Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Gary Schmitt is director of strategic studies there.

How can this be? Surely there's a Democratic liberal in here somewhere...oh wait, here's a pitch for more cancer funding from pancreatic cancer victim Patrick Swayze. Well, he is a Hollywood actor, he probably is a Democrat...

Oh wait, something approaching a liberal position: "You Can Cap The Pay, But the Greed Will Go On."
Author note: Rakesh Khurana is a professor at Harvard Business School. Andy Zelleke is co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Hot damn, I finally found me some liberal elitists!

I move on to "Foreign Spies Are Serious. Are We?" Michelle Van Cleave served as head of U.S. counterintelligence from July 2003 through March 2006. She is a senior research fellow at the National Defense University and a special adviser to the Project on National Security Reform. Well, she's not affiliated with any right-wing think tanks, but she worked for Doug Feith and was a consultant to the CIA - so I'm guessing not a Democrat, and not a liberal.

Oh wait, better luck in the other sections. Here's a Georgetown professor talking about a revival of liberal patriotism.

But then David Broder says he's skeptical of terms like "blue wall" - even though he exhorts the Republicans to climb it.

Personally, I really liked this article about finding your one true Valentine. But then, I would - after all, I'm a bleeding heart liberal.

Generally speaking, though, if you were looking for liberal voices to speak out on national policy issues, issues that might interest the politicians (okay, their staffers) who pore over the Washington Post every day, well, you should probably look elsewhere. They say they have liberals over at the New York Times, so maybe next week I'll give it a look!

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Brent Bozell during a discussion on William F. Buckley Jr.'s book The Reagan I Knew on C-SPAN's Book TV opining over the state of the media today and wondering if William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan would have had their voices heard in today's television media. He makes the huge stretch of comparing Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on cable news today to Walter Cronkite, David Frost and Merv Griffin, like they had the same audience.

While I completely agree with Bozell that way too many on the cable news networks are forced to come on television and try to make a point in two minute sound bytes and that does nothing to add to any real political discourse in this country, him using that pretense to say that either Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley Jr. would not have had their opinions propogated by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" is a complete joke.

Other than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann we don't have any progressives controlling the narrative out there... period, on any of the cable news networks or on the big three. We have sorry milk toast excuses for surrogates that supposedly represent the "liberal" side of an issue and the Democrats apparently have not gotten the message yet that the press is not their friend. When they decide to break up these media monopolies that are controlling everything we watch and listen to I'll feel that maybe they have started to get a clue.

I had a conversation with a friend that I sadly found out liked Sean Hannity recently. It made me wonder how much time I wanted to spend with her in the future since it is hard to have sane conversations with someone who's basically been brainwashed, but at least we had an honest dialog that evening about where this country is headed and she answered a question I had for her about how many progressives she even knew existed.

She had no idea who Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers were, and she had no clue that any of the major much less lesser read liberal blogs out there even existed. I named a bunch of them off and let her know that if she didn't know who those people were she actually had no idea what the other side of the story was, and what an alternative view point to Sean Hannity was.

Brent Bozell may not be happy that the conservatives of our time actually have a couple people out there taking them to task on the TV machine as Rachel puts it, but to try to pretend that conservatives haven't had a chance to put their narrative out there because Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been allowed to be on the air on MSNBC is an utter and complete joke. And comparing them to anyone who anchored a major news network when that's all the public had to watch at the time during the era of Cronkite is an even bigger joke.

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From Bill Moyers Journal:

President Obama's message of change resounded deeply with Americans tired of "business as usual" in Washington, but most people, the President included, have admitted that change does not come easily to Washington. As the President's agenda meets its first resistance in the Capitol, two guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL argue that the establishment has a surprising army of defenders — the political press.

Full transcript to follow.

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The media have already been called out on their ridiculous stacking of the news talk shows regarding the Obama stimulus plan with Republicans. It doesn't seem to be getting much better; the Sunday talk shows were reasonably balanced this week, but most of the panels and "expert appearances" discussing the plan have been laden with rabid right-wing ideologues.

And it hasn't been just on Fox, though the problem is acute there. Yesterday on CNN, for instance, who should John King have on to discuss the stimulus on the "State of the Union" program but our old friend Grover Norquist.

Norquist pontificated at length about how a Republican alternative should look. It was just more of the same crap conservatives have been feeding us the past decade: tax cuts, deregulation, shrink government, blah blah blah.

Now, I can think of a lot of people the public could be getting sound advice about the economy from. Some of them could even fall in the "conservative" category. Grover Norquist is not one of them.

After all, this is the man whose philosophy of government is summed up in one quip:

"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

In other words, this was one of the geniuses who not only brought us Katrina and food poisonings but the economic calamity now confronting us.

Thanks, but no thanks. And until John King and his producers can demonstrate they know how to bring on people who can actually provide useful insights and not ideological propaganda, I won't be tuning in.

I'm reading Will "Attytood" Bunch's new book, "Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" about how deeply ingrained the Reagan mythology is in our country's political culture (with the help, of course, of a complicit media).

Fascinating book, really thorough. (There are things in here I didn't even know, and I'm more informed about Reagan than the average bear.) The Reagan myth is so large, so unquestioned that he even gets credit for the things he didn't do: Star Wars! Stopped the Cold War! Made the economy hum like a top! (If you have a Reagan-loving in-law, this is the book you want to read before your next family get-together.)

From the first chapter:

[...] The Reagan myth isn’t just a political problem for the GOP. Increasingly, as the idealized Reagan took hold in the American imagination, Democrats seemed to struggle even harder with the question of just who was Ronald Reagan – and whether political success going forward depended upon undercutting Reagan’s legend, simply ignoring it, or embracing all or part of it. That’s why it was a political bombshell when Sen. Barack Obama made it clear in early 2008 that Reaganism was playing some role in his thinking as he mapped out his own more progressive route to the White House – but the specifics of what Obama was getting at were open to debate.

"Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama told the editorial board of the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal in January 2008. Seeking to elaborate, the Democratic senator said that "[w]e want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." Obama’s comments caused a scramble among his Democrats: Was the presidential frontrunner simply praising the political style of the twice-elected Republican, or was his comment also intended to voice support for some of Reagan’s policy ideas? Obama advisors stressed the former – that he was merely seeking to remind voters of Reagan’s “hope and optimism.”

Obama’s statements seemed to flummox the Democrats in 2008 almost as much as Reagan himself did circa 1984. John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who was appealing to the party’s more progressive wing in those early primaries, said Reagan “openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day…I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

And yet just a couple of weeks later, it was Edwards who was gone from the presidential race, and Obama who was soldiering on – leaving the unanswered questions of whether even a progressive Democrat in the White House could tackle not just the immediate problems of Iraq, record-high gasoline prices, a skyrocketing federal debt but the more ominous issues of world energy supply and climate change without doing so under the deepening shadow of the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

How did we get to this point in American politics? It would be easy to give all the credit to the Ronald Reagan myth machine, to the neo-conservatives and tax-warriors-turned-lobbyists behind the move to seemingly pave over and rename one long Ronald Reagan Boulevard from sea to shining sea. But no myth would be possible without the man. And if there was ever a man who instinctively knew how to write that screenplay – who rode in from Hollywood to create a new kind of presidency that would focus on strong words and cinematic images that would last long after people forgot the policies sometimes loosely attached to them – it was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Eugene Robinson notes that the main reason Gov. Rod Blagojevich is being impeached is that he's a wacky guy with a bad haircut. And you know, he's right. I mean, I've read the transcripts, I've looked at the information. I just don't see anything criminal there.

I wrote about this kind of thing before. When I was a reporter, I saw that the feds would simply decide to go after someone. If they couldn't find enough to indict, they'd simply leak politically damaging information instead, with the idea of forcing them to resign. (One guy referred to it as "extermination.")

I pointed out that as far as I knew, we still had to convict someone in this country before we could refer to them as guilty, and said, "What if you're wrong? What if you do to to someone who isn't guilty?"

But Fibbies don't think like that. They think with their gut! They're never wrong! Except, of course, when they are.

So until someone indicts even though they've indicted wacky Bad Hair Man with criminal charges, I'd still take the whole thing with a very large grain of salt.