Remember Karen Hughes, a devoted Bushie from Texas who was sent to the Middle East to tell women how lucky they were that we invaded and occupied Iraq
December 20, 2007

Remember Karen Hughes, a devoted Bushie from Texas who was sent to the Middle East to tell women how lucky they were that we invaded and occupied Iraq, because it brought them freedom? Karen has gone home to Texas again, but the Bush administration still needs a snake oil salesman undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs to tell everyone that things are really going great. Guess who they picked?

(T)he AP has learned that the Bush administration has named her replacement: James Glassman.

So who is James Glassman? Read on, dear reader, read on.

It's the fall of 1999. The dot-com boom is going strong, and Glassman, formerly an honest business journalist and managing editor of Roll Call, co-authors Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, which argues "Stock prices could double, triple, or even quadruple tomorrow and still not be too high." He had been a mere talk show host and financial columnist syndicated by the Washington Post. Now he was a superstar--for telling the Masters of the Universe exactly what fantasies they wanted to hear. [..]

Glassman catapulted his berth on the best-seller lists into a for-profit web site, Tech Central Station, "a cross between a journal of Internet opinion and cyber think tank open to the public," proffering "a high-tech agenda of freedom and opportunity."The Dow then began its two-year long shedding of 30 percent of its value. All the while, Glassman pulled down over 100 lecture gigs a year trumpeting, "We are on the verge of a tremendous wealth explosion, the likes of which has never been seen."[..]

TCS mysteriously thrived where other Internet startups hemorrhaged cash. How? Why? In an extremely important 2003 Washington Monthly article by Nick Confessore(from which I draw the above narrative), Glassman pioneered a bold new brand of pay-for-play "journalism."

Wrote Confessore:

"As a writer and public figure, Glassman has, over time, aligned his views with those of the business interests that dominate K Street and support hte Republican Party; he has also increasingly taken aggressive positions on one side or another of intra-industra debates....

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one-the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington.... read on

Yup, this is the perfect guy to sell America to the Middle East, doncha think?

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