Moderation

David Broder, herb-doctor?

Moderation is a relative term. Whether its results are likely to be good, bad or indifferent depend on what's being "moderated". But when sickeningly cynical abstract hosannas to Compromise like the one delivered a couple of weeks ago by Evan Bayh and Bob Bennett become common - and literate adults start acting like they are taking them seriously - it's hard not to notice that moderation can be pathological, too. Especially when that particular instance had both apostles of moderation heartily endorsing the Obama-McConnell tax deal, which included an obscene tax subsidy for billionaires and the first concrete step toward Social Security Phaseout ever adopted by a Democratic President.

Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) includes a conversation between an anti-slavery Missourian and a weaselly herb-doctor. Near the end of their exchange, the Missourian confronts the herb-doctor with the question, "You are an abolitionist, ain't you?" This at a time when the battles over slavery - literal battles in Kansas Territory - had dominated national politics for years. The herb-doctor replies:

"As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean a zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody's interest, and therefore, rousing nobody's enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say."

"Picked and prudent sentiments [says the Missourian]. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."

The herb-doctor today could have a good career as a TV pundit. Come to think of it, David Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, may actually be the herb-doctor himself!

Tags: david broder, democratic party

The glories of Centrism (with a capital "c"), or, the ecstasies of High Broderism

Paul Krugman sees an ominous sign for the future of Obama's Presidency: "Uh-oh. David Broder says the tax deal marks the beginning of Obama’s recovery. The president is doomed." (The Doom of Broder Conscience 12/12/2010)

The article to which he refers by The Dean Of All The Pundits is Centrist on the riseWashington Post 12/09/2010. To the Grand Master of the cult of High Broderism, Obama's collapse to the Republicans on the tax deal without any fight on his part visible enough that anyone noticed is the height of Democratic statesmanship and political wisdom:

In these past few days, he has regained the economic initiative from the victorious Republicans, separated himself from the left of his own party and staked a strong claim to the territory where national elections are fought and won: the independent center.

The key virtue here in the world of High Broderism is that Obama "separated himself from the left of his own party". Always a praiseworthy act on the part of Democrats in the value-system of the Beltway Village.

Obama now has a shot at winning over some Tea Party voters, the Dean pronounces. And, as Digby predicted, Obama's Tuesday press conference attacking the "sanctimonious" Democratic base was an orgasmic moment for the Dean:

Obama used his news conference Tuesday to define himself, more clearly than ever before, as a raging moderate - a man who recognizes that compromise is the key to serving a broad and diverse set of constituencies, rather than fit some ideological standard of intellectual purity.

This was the best showing for Obama in many months.

Broder does remind us what passes for Seriousness in the Village:

Also, the $900 billion this deal will add to the national debt increases the pressure on Obama and Congress to undertake the kind of tough-love budgetary changes outlined by the presidential commission on deficits.

You see, a deficit-increasing tax subsidy for billionaires is a good thing because it increase pressure to cut spending. Especially for Social Security, which does not contribute to the deficit at all.

Krugman also catches the Post's Dana Milbank rewriting the history of the health care reform debate to blame them thar libruls for delaying its passage, as Krugman explain in Orwellian Centrism Conscience 12/12/2010.

To add another groaner to the Post's record these last few days, we have Kathleen Parker in Can we become an America WikiLeaks can't assail? 12/12/2010, displaying her deep knowledge of the digital world, loosely basing her ramblings on the Wikileaks story:

It is convenient to blame poor little Julian Assange, the cyberkind who published the leaks that someone stole.

He is now a martyr to the brat brigades who occupy basements and attics, keeping the company of others similarly occupied with virtual life.

Assange is the king brat, but only du jour. He will be displaced soon enough by more ambitious hacks whose delinquent and, worse, sinister inclinations are enabled by technology. Alas, we are at the mercy of giddy, power-hungry nerds operating beyond the burden of responsibility or accountability.

Poor Kathleen is just struggling to her her mind around this here Internet thingy, it seems.

But the real problem in, well, whatever it is she's trying to talk about, is that Obama is a wimp making Amurica weak:

With the exception of our military, we are a flabby lot, and I'm not just talking about girth. We are merely disgusting in that department. I'm talking about our self-discipline, our individual will, our self-respect, our voluntary order.

Note the operative words: self, individual and voluntary. ...

It's still a jungle out there, however, and the weak lose every time. [my emphasis]

In more democratic-minded times, we might have called Parker's idolatry of the military just plain militarism. These days, it's stock Republican-friendly Village conventional wisdom, hardly meriting notice in respectable commentary.

Tags: bipartisanship, david broder, militarism

The unbearable Broderism of David Broder

The Washington Post's David Broder, who for some reason not fathomable to mere mortals is regard as The Dean Of All The Pundits, gives a classic example today of what High Broderism means: the idolizing of bipartisanship - in the form of Democrats capitulating to Republicans - and pretending it's moderation.

In Dole-Ford era offers model for Obama-GOP cooperation 10/21/2010. The Dean has been visiting Kansas, where he finds that all is as it should be:

... I found it an intriguing place to assess the closing stage of the 2010 campaign. What I learned was no surprise. Kansas is about to join the national trend. The governorship, which had been held for years by Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's secretary of health and human services, is almost certainly going to revert to the GOP. The one Democrat in the House delegation is retiring this year, and his wife, who is trying to hold the seat, is unlikely to succeed.

President Obama's comments about hoping to get along with Repubilcans in his now-notorious Peter Baker interview last week sent a thrill up The Dean's leg. And he reminisces about two model moderate Republican statesmen, President Gerald Ford and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

That would be Jerry Ford, who as President made Donald Rumsfeld his chief of staff, who in turn hired Dick Cheney as his deputy. And, oh yeah, Ford gave Richard Nixon a blanket pardon for all crimes committed as President, establishing an ever-growing tradition of freedom from accountability for Republican Presidents breaking the law.

And that would be Bob Dole of Kansas, whose key backers included the billionaire Koch brothers, the Libertarian/Bircher types who are key funders of Tea Party events and also of climate-change-denial pseudoscience propaganda. To The Dean Of All The Pundits, they are great models of moderate wisdom, which is why they fit so well in the pantheon of High Broderism. Plus, they were part of The Greatest Generation, don't you know?

It helped that they came to Washington as young military veterans, survivors of a war against an implacable enemy. They knew the difference between the Nazis, who were truly evil, and the Democrats, who were simply fellow Americans with different political beliefs.

For Obama and the Republicans to establish a productive post-election atmosphere, it may require nothing more than the recapture of that wisdom of their political forebears. Behave as if you are veterans, and today's political disputes will recede to their proper size.

I might have been slightly moved by that had I not just yesterday been looking at a pamphlet from 1944 promoting the candidacy of Republican Presidential nominee Thomas Dewey. It said Franklin Roosevelt was a Commie. This was in the middle of The Good War of The Greatest Generation. I guess that means that any day now, Glenn Beck will be held up as a model of High Broderist statesmanship. Or punditship, whatever.

Meanwhile, also at the Post, Dana Milbank - who slipped up and did some half-decent reporting on Beck recently - asks Is the NAACP trying to pick a fight with the Tea Party? 10/20/2010. Dana is gobsmacked that the NAACP, the oldest civil-rights organization in the country - the initials originally stood for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - put out a report calling out white racism occurring in the present!!! Oh, Miss Melly, bring me the smelling salts!

Tags: david broder

The power of scripts: David Broder on the bold Maverick McCain

This dimwitted column from David Broder shows just how impervious to reality our Pod Pundits' favorite scripts can be: John McCain, your country is calling Washington Post 08/26/2010.

Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, is the highest high priest for the ideal of Potemkin bipartisanship. And Broder has been in love with McCain's maverick image for so long that apparently nothing can convince him that McCain isn't any kind of moderate, at least not by any meaningful definition of the word: not his hardline pro-Bush voting record, not his shameless warmongering, not his Mean Mister Mustard Presidential campaign, not his anti-immigrant demagoguery, not even McCain's own (false) insistence that he had never claimed to be a moderate.

The Dean declares of the bold Maverick McCain: "The reputation he established for independence -- for being his own man, no matter what the pressures -- has survived the vagaries of an exceptionally long career."

Because when you construct a phony script out of hot air and maintain it by wishful thinking, no vagaries of an exceptionally different reality staring you in the face is going to change that. For the Dean, McCain's the legendary Maverick. No matter what.

That's the kind of decisive analysis The Dean always brings to bear. Like in this Post column of 02/11/2010, Sarah Palin displays her pitch-perfect populism. ¡Caramba! The Dean's finely-tuned political ear knows that Sarah Palin is speaking to the soul of the Real Americans. Why, she's lots like George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton! No, it doesn't make jack for sense. But The Dean just knows about these things.

Tags: bipartisanship, david broder, mccain

Obama's foreign policy and "humanitarian intervention"

I'm no fan of Tom Edsall's political analysis. He seems for years to have fundamentally bought in to the conventional, Republican-friendly assumption among many in the media that the politics of racism were so powerful that unless the Democrats pandered hard to the "culture war" issues of the Republicans (of which the direct and indirect racial elements have always been the most significant), the Republicans would be a permanent majority.

But he is capable of doing some good reporting. And he seems to be sticking to journalism in reporting the Washington scuttlebutt about possible Obama administration appointments in The Obama Test: Personnel is Policy Huffington Post 10/24/08. The "test" aspect he explains as follows:

The appointments Obama makes are not only the blood and guts of Washington gossip, but, more importantly, they are clear signals of the direction the new administration will take, reflecting the accuracy of the observation that "personnel is policy." For the Washington lobbying and special interest group community, appointments are crucial, determining success, access, and business.

Now, the media and the Republicans will be posing many such "tests" for the Obama administration during the Presidential transition. (Yes, I know I'm talking about it likes its a done deal.) Some of them will be more meaningful than others. Obama will predictable "fail" the Republican "tests". And he'll likely fail the media "tests", too.

David Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, elaborate the currently favored pundit "test" in What Honeymoon? The Proposals That Could Bind Obama Washington Post 10/12/08. The Dean declares that "the new president will face an early test: Repair the battered financial system or move ahead on the Democrats' domestic agenda." To The Dean, it is apparently self-evident that the one is entirely incompatible with the other.

Similarly frivolous "tests" will be applied to Obama's foreign policy, as well.

But Edsall is right in that the staffing of major positions is a key test in the minds of many people, some using more substantial measures than others. It will also be a key test for those of us looking for a more restrained and realistic foreign policy. Edsall mentions Samantha Power as being on the short list for National Security Advisor, at least in the minds of whoever it is on whom he's relying for his article. And that's almost certainly true. Before she had a foot-in-mouth moment about Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, Power was Obama's leading foreign policy advisor. So this recent article of hers takes on extra interest in that light, Is Humanitarian Intervention Dead? History offers some sobering lessons by Samantha Power Slate 09/29/08:

"Humanitarian intervention" is a problematic phrase for the obvious reason that "intervention," which in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999) meant bombing, is a fundamentally un-humanitarian act. The word intervention is also unhelpful because it means a range of different things to different people. Some use the word to signal the deployment of military forces. Many others (including me) see intervention as lying on a continuum - with mediation, diplomatic denunciation, travel bans, asset freezes, arms embargoes, and the deployment of consensual peacekeepers (as in East Timor in 1999) understood as often being the wisest responses to atrocities. Given their risks, war and occupation seem advisable only in rare circumstances where the risks of using other tools are even greater. (In my view this consequentialist test was passed in Bosnia and flunked in the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq.) But one thing is certain: A decadelong mainstream debate over humanitarian intervention ground to an abrupt halt in the wake of the Bush administration's disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 2008 the governments of Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe can sleep easy knowing that, while they might be criticized for their brutality, they will not be stopped. [my emphasis in bold]

Power is generally seen as an "humanitarian hawk", a phrase which I think is almost as much an oxymoron as "humanitarian war". The latter a concept about which I have great reservations. Because war is an evil in itself. I'm not a pacifist - very few people actually are - but I take the Christian concept of the Just War and secular international law very seriously. So I think war really should be a last resort.

Having said that, I also supported the intervention in Bosnia and the Kosovo War in the 1990s. Still, while the humanitarian issues were real, my overriding concern there was the threat of widespread instability in the form of bloody ethnic civil wars spreading throughout the Balkans and eastern Europe as a result of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

And I try to keep my eyes open even (I like to think especially) with wars I support. What set the stage politically and militarily for the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995 to be possible was not some great upsurge of humanitarian compassion. It was the fact that the Croatian army became strong enough to push the Serbian army out of the occupied areas of Croatia and fight them to a standstill. And in the process, they did so by carrying out "ethnic cleansing" against Serbs every bit as cruel as the Serbs practiced against Croats and Bosnians, though quantitatively on a smaller scale because they didn't have control of as many Serbs.

The NATO intervention did mitigate humanitarian consequences, as I understand it. And the special international tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia has proceeded against Croatian perpetrators as well as Serbians. But the NATO intervention in Bosnia wasn't an armed Peace Corps mission. It was war.

Likewise in Kosovo, I never understood the main practical purpose as humanitarian, though the security consequences for Europe of a massive ethnic cleansing of Kosovars there can scarcely be separated from the humanitarian ones. The intervention was legitimated by the United Nations, more or less. Though whether US participation actually complied with Constitutional requirement is another question, "quaint" though such a consideration may seem. The Senate did pass a nonbinding concurrent resolution authorizing air and missile operations against Serbia. But "The war against Yugoslavia began on March 24 [1999] without any statutory or constitutional support," writes legal scholar Louis Fisher.

Republican Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma said at the time, "President Clinton asked many nations to agree to attack Yugoslavia, but he failed to get permission from one crucial country, America."

In retrospect, I still think the NATO intervention in Kosovo was justified at the time (leaving aside the question of US Constitutional processes for the moment). But there really is a lot to learn from it, and those lessons should make the US very cautious about a similar intervention any time in the foreseeable future. Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, two names not normally placed on the same side of military-strategic issues, edited a collection of essays called War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001), that I hope to blog more about at some point. The book looks at the actual results and various implications of the Kosovo War as they were understood at the time of publication. In humanitarian terms, it's clear that the NATO (primarily US and British) air war in Kosovo allowed Serbia to accelerate the process of ethnic cleansing in the short term, though it was later reversed after the war was concluded.

NATO still maintains a substantial force in Kosovo even today, with no exit in sight. They were unable in practice to prevent retaliatory ethnic cleansing against Serbs in Kosovo. And the unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence, cheerfully backed by the Cheney-Bush administration, was very much a factor in the power politics of Russia's current position toward Georgia and Ukraine.

And even though NATO was intervening to protect a primarily Muslim population (Kosovar Albanians) from a primarily Christian people (Serbia), it didn't seem to earn us a lot of goodwill on that score in the Muslim world. The low-level air war against Iraq, which became intense during the grotesquely named Operation Desert Fox in 1998, was one of several issues that outweighed Kosovo and Bosnia in the Muslim world. ("Low-level" is very much a relative term in this context.)

Power in her article recognizes that purity of motive in the matter of alleged humanitarian intervention is a rare commodity. "Governments are guided primarily by national security and economic concerns, and large-scale suffering tends to register only when powerful domestic political constituencies force it onto the agenda."

And she quotes an Ottoman minister from 1822 when Britain was threatening to intervene against the Ottoman Empire in its conflict with Greek rebels, "Why do not the Christian Sovereigns interfere to prevent the Emperor of Russia from sending his subjects into Siberia? Because they know very well what answer they would receive! Thus there is one law of humanity for Turkey and another for Russia!" The Christian sovereigns of Europe at that time were united with the Czar of Russia in international solidarity against further revolutions of the French type in Europe.

It's encouraging to see Power's expressed caution on "humanitarian" intervention in this piece. She states the dilemma of such situations in her closing paragraph:

History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good. But history shows the costs, too - in Rwanda and today in Darfur - of failing to prevent mass murder. The fate of future atrocity victims may turn on whether it is possible to find a path between blinding zeal and paralyzing perfectionism.

The reason I've had no enthusiasm for American intervention in Darfur is mainly for two reasons. One, we have an administration now that is not only cruel but criminal in its war and torture policies, cynical in the extreme in exploiting public policy for crony-capitalist purposes, and incompetent on top of it all.

Second, even the purist of intentions on the part of the intervening foreign power don't erase the very practical problems of occupying another country - which almost any such intervention would and should entail. Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan have provided us many recent examples of the problems of using air power to deal with civil-war type conflicts. But we also see from the "coalition's" experience in Iraq and NATO's experience in Afghanistan that successful occupation, counterinsurgency and nation-building require local allies, language skills, intensive familiarity with the local cultures, and long-term commitments of money and personnel.

And despite the enthusiasms and techno-dreams of our air power zealots especially, war always brings unpredictable consequences. It can't be contained in "full-spectrum dominance", to use the fashionable term that will probably now be fazed out because the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan have proven it to be a psychedelic dream. Excuse the painfully obvious metaphor, but war is the ultimate "loose cannon". The First World War started with a Serbian fanatic assassinating the Habsburg Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo with the connivance of the Serbian secret service. The Habsburgs wanted to retaliate by shooting up Serbia for a while. When the dust cleared, millions were dead, four great empires (the Habsburgs' Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Russian and the Ottoman) had shuffled off the stage of history, and even the victors Britain and France were devastated by the human and financial costs of the conflict, which was mostly a massive, senseless carnage.

Would the United States have fared better occupying Rwanda than we have occupying Iraq or Afghanistan? I doubt it very much.

Tags: david broder, samantha power, thomas edsall

Big Pundits agree! (And agree, and agree)

Melchizedek, the David Broder of the Book of Genesis

We have a bill about to be enacted (the FISA update) that takes another big whack at the Constitution and the rule of law. We also had a horse-race issue last week when Obama decided not to take public financing for his general election campaign.

Of course, the Big Pundits focused their attention on the FISA issue. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Sorry. I have to amuse myself with these silly thoughts every now and then.

Now, it doesn't particularly bother me one way or another that Obama opted out of public funding. The system allows the candidates to choose one or the other. Obama's fundraising has allowed him to build an impressive Internet base of small donors which he judged would provide better funding for the general election than public financing. He's also demanded that pro-Obama 527 groups not run independent campaigns, while McCain piously pretends he doesn't like the Republican 527's but yawns that he can't do anything about them. Meanwhile, the bold Maverick is, according to the Republican head of the Federal Election Commission, breaking the law in the way he's handled public financing.

Obama is surely aware, as well, that one big problem John Kerry had in 2004 was that by opting in to public financing, he was limited in the amount he could spend in the summer when the Swift Boat Liars for Bush opened their publicity campaign against him. With the Republicans' worst barracudas going after him (see Dave Neiwert, The Obama Smear Merchants Keep On Smearin’ Firedoglake blog 06/18/08), Obama decided not to take the chance of a repeat of that experience.

So on the PBS Newshour - "quality" television - the liberal pundit Mark Shields and the conservative pundit David Brooks discussed Obama's fundraising decision first up (Shields, Brooks Discuss Obama's Fundraising Shift, McCain's Energy Proposal 06/20/08). One of them said:

He became the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1972 to state that his campaign will be funded totally by private donations with no limits on spending.

It was a flip-flop of epic proportions. It was one that he could not rationalize or justify. His video was unconvincing. He looked like someone who was being kept as a hostage somewhere he was so absolutely unconvincing in it. It could not have passed a polygraph test.

I mean, coming up with this bogus argument the Republicans have so much more money - the Republicans don't have so much more money. He's raised three times as much as John McCain has.

He has every possible committee, except Republican National Committee, Democrats at the Senate level, congressional level have this lopsided edge over Republicans. They spent three times as much, did Democratic leaning 527s, in the last election as did Republicans.

So what Obama didn't admit was, up until February of this year, when he told Tim Russert that not only would he aggressively seek an agreement on public financing, that he personally would sit down with John McCain and work it out, then, all of a sudden, they realized that all these small contributions were coming in and he was going to have a financial advantage in the fall against the Republican, and they grabbed it.

The other said:

He treated it as if some noble decision to finalize democracy. It was ludicrous.

I do think it's the low point of the Obama candidacy, and I think it for this reason. His entire career he has put political reform at the center of it. In the Illinois legislature, in the Senate, political reform has been the essence of who he has been. And so for him to betray this, to sell out this issue, what won't he sell out?

And it really reveals something about his conscience. It reveals that he has this idealistic side, which is a serious policy side, but he also has a tough Machiavellian side, a political hack side, and he wants to win.

And so, in some ways, this is terrible because it's epic hypocrisy. In some ways, if you want a tough SOB to be your president, he's shown he is a tough S.O.B.

It was "epic" hypocrisy, the gentlemen agreed. (If it matters, "liberal" Shields was the first, conservative Brooks the second.)

Brooks peered into Obama's soul and told us what it revealed about Obama's conscience. It showed Obama was an S.O.B., Brooks explained, "a political hack" who made a "terrible" decision. Worst of all, it shows that Obama "wants to win"! This, of course, is taken to be a grievous sin on the part of a Democratic Presidential candidate.

Can our top political commentators really be this dumb? "Liberal" Shields went on to explain that Obama had thereby gone back on the central mission of his campaign, which presumably was to do what Mark Shields and David Brooks wanted him to do so that John McCain could coast to the White House and the pundits wouldn't have to rearrange their scripts too seriously come November. Shields did manage to note in passing that:

John McCain is no plaster saint on this issue. McCain opted into public financing to get a bank loan, private bank loan for his campaign during the primaries, and then, as soon as money started to come in, he pulled out of public financing.

Somehow, the illegality of McCain's gaming of public financing never came up. Brooks then quickly jumped in to show that this issue, while it was a "terrible" blight on Obama's character and revealed the sorry state of his conscience, McCain's breaking the campaign financial laws illustrated the Maverick's saintly "character":

But McCain wouldn't have done this. When the chips are down and McCain faced the crucial issue of his career, which was backing the surge, he backed the surge thinking it would cost him the presidency.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Troops in Iraq.

DAVID BROOKS: On a core issue of character, I do not believe McCain will bend. He'll bend on all this other stuff he doesn't care about, but Obama did bend on a core issue of his conscience. (my emphasis)

Does that make any sense at all? No. But Big Pundits are operating on a higher level of enlightenment. Shields then chimed in with a mild shot at our greatest living saint:

You tell me what the core issues of character, what they bend on. I mean, John has been quite flexible. And I do think John McCain has got a lot more political capital fighting for campaign finance reform than the Democrats have, because their constituency is far more disposed to it than is John McCain's.

McCain "has been quite flexible". Shields had been in high dudgeon a moment before about the awful scandal of Obama's lying, irrational, unjustifiable, unconvincing actions, a negative mark of "epic proportions". But by now, he could only mutter something about "John" being "quite flexible" on issues that may or may not have been "core issues of character". He then went on to explain how McCain, the man who's actually breaking the campaign finance laws (as opposed to just making a funding decision of which Big Punidts disapproved) has more "political capital" on campaign reform because McCain's own Party is against it.

Only in the world of High Broderism do such things make sense, pronounced by visionary pundits with deep insight into "core issues of character" and into the candidates' consciences. And our Pundit Lightbringers know that McCain is a Maverick of deep "character", while Obama is a very troubling and strange person. Why, Obama has a clearly defective conscience because - cover the children's ears - "he wants to win"! McCain breaks the campaign finance laws, and this shows he's a person of deep integrity and of greater credibility on ... campaign finance laws.

Yes, even the cream of our punditocracy is really this kooky.

Oh, that little operation to gut the Constitution? Conservative Brooks declared:

On FISA, I think it's quite a good compromise. I don't think -- if you're a phone company executive, the government comes to you and asks you to do stuff, I think you should be protected. And then there are these series of gestures.

So I think, actually, it was pretty good week for Congress.

Taking the "liberal" side, Lightbringer Shields explained:

Well, I think Barack Obama, if he hasn't already - I was told today - is going to endorse what passed the House. So I think that will probably solidify Democrats and encourage Senate Democrats. Maybe it will discourage Republicans from supporting the FISA.

That was our "liberal" Big Pundit's rousing defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Brooks explained Obama's troubling "character" deficiencies in his Friday New York Times column, The Two Obamas 06/20/08:

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside. (my emphasis)

Yes, this oh-so-troubling person "wants to win".

This also shows that Lightbringer Brooks is not only full of spiritual insight into character and conscience, but an intuitive psychiatrist, as well, discerning that Obama is a "split-personality politician". Do Times editors ever ask simple question like, "What the [Cheney] does that even mean?" But, admittedly, it's truly shocking that a Presidential candidate might make a campaign funding decision based on its advantages in helping him win. Shocking! Just shocking!

He proceeds to list various instances in which Brooks thinks Obama threw somebody or something "under the truck". He elaborates on the cosmic nature of Obama campaign financing decision:

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa's final steps to sainthood. (my emphasis)

But Brooks' metaphysical insights obviously desert him when he writes, "The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money)." (my emphasis) Clearly, "the media" care deeply about this disturbing insight into Obama's character, conscience and psychiatric condition.

McCain breaking campaign finance laws? More evidence of his solid "character" and Maverickness.

And, to Brooks, it seems that worrying about Republican 527s is obviously a phony concern. Surely, the Republicans won't try another Swift Boat Liars campaign this year, even though it worked for them so well in 2004. Even though his own paper just reported on how the notorious Floyd Brown is doing just that already. (It was a poor report, so maybe Brooks just isn't aware of what's going on.)

Tim Russert is no longer with us. But Meet the Press is. His fellow member of the Irish-Catholic MSNBC news mafia, Brian Williams, sat in for him on Sunday. They didn't get around to analyzing the FISA revision and telecom amnesty. Why worry about such boring nonsense when there are horse-race issues to bat around? Besides, a whole weekend and more of mourning Tim Russert clearly weren't enough. They had to devote the last 15 minutes of the show to yet another tribute to Russert's legendary greatness. I didn't watch it. So I don't know if they discussed Russert's failures as a journalist around the Iraq War. I did hear from the other room that part of their reminiscence was accompanied by a sappy version of "Over the Rainbow". So, I'll make a wild guess without having read that part of the transcript and say they didn't get into much evaluation of his failures as a journalist.

But Over the Rainbow is clearly the realm in which our Big Pundits typically operate. Only from such heavenly perspective could Obama's compliance with campaign finance laws be a sign of his deeply flawed "character" while McCain's breaking them shows his sterling "character".

The Meet the Press transcript and podcast for 06/22/08 are available. You can see that Brian Williams started off with the urgent issue of Obama's scandalously bad-"character" decision about financing his general election campaign. His guests the first half-hour were Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Republican Sen. Lindsey "Huckleberry" Graham.

Biden actually made a credible case. And to the minds of a less-evolved being like me, he pretty much chewed Huckleberry up in the debate. Biden said, yes, Obama changed his mind on public financing. He elaborated on the issue:

SEN. BIDEN: Look, I've been a strong supporter of public financing my, my whole career. I'm the first guy to introduce a public financing bill to the United States Senate in 1973. And the purpose was to get big money out of the politics. The irony is, although he has changed his position - I'm not going to color that, he's changed his position - the fact of the matter is he has 1,400,000 contributors, the vast majority of whom contribute less than a hundred bucks a piece. So the effect of campaign financing is in place, but it's not campaign financing.

MR. WILLIAMS: So this is, all because of the structure of the Obama campaign, the support, the support levels they're finding they have on the Internet, a pragmatic decision.

SEN. BIDEN: Well, yes. But it's also a substantive decision in that no one major influence can affect Obama. He has 1,400,000 contributors. Not one of them could say, "If I don't - if you don't change your mind, I'm withdrawing my support." Whereas with campaigns, the reason I was so - I am so supportive of campaign financing, major interests that are able to accumulate hundreds of thousands, in this case, millions of dollars can say, "Hey, look, you don't change your mind, I leave." So in terms of the downside of his not accepting it in terms of influence and big money, there is no influence or big money in his campaign. In terms of undermining the public financing idea for everyone, it doesn't help.

How is it that the "liberal" Big Pundit Mark Shields couldn't be bothered to even mention that point on the PBS Newshour? Much less the role of Republican 527 Swiftboat campaign in 2004?

Huckleberry sat there pretty much the whole time with a smarmy smirk on his face, saying things like:

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator Graham, does this mean it's broken forever?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): It means his word's broken forever on this issue. I think that's what it means more than anything else. You tell people you're going to change this country, you're going to bring about change that people yearn to, to embrace. Senator McCain supported campaign finance reform at his detriment with Senator Feingold on our side. It did not go over well, but John did it anyway. He took a beating to try to change the campaign finance system. Senator Obama looked in cameras all over the country, literally signed his name, "I will accept public financing," and now, for whatever reason, he has broken his word. And is it 1.4 million donors that allows you to break your word? This is reinforcing everything that's wrong with politics. This is a game changer in terms of the general election. This will not go unnoticed by the American people...

SEN. BIDEN: But he did say...

SEN. GRAHAM: ... and it will not be soon forgotten. (my emphasis)

Yes, Huckleberry Graham, hardline supporter of the Iraq War and The Surge, who went along with the prewar fake evidence about WMDs and Saddam's (nonexistent) Al Qa'ida ties, is very, very, very concerned about honesty and consistency and integrity in politics. You have to see his expressions and hear his voice inflections to get the full effect of how deeply, deeply disappointed Huckleberry is that Obama is falling short of his great promise as a political leader.

Perhaps inspired by the latest insights of Lightbringer Brooks, Huckleberry said:

The public financing system that we all are touting here today as great has been abandoned by one candidate, and that wasn't John McCain. [Actually, Huckleberry was the only one on the program who mentioned the current system as being "great".] It's been abandoned because of political expediency. He's a calculating politician. The bottom line about, about Barack Obama, whatever the position, whether it be Iraq, campaign finance reform, public financing, he's going to take a tack that allows him to win. He wants to win beyond anything else, even more than keeping his word. (my emphasis)

Lordy, how will the Democrats save their endangered souls with the Party headed by a Presidential candidate who "wants to win"? Never has an American political party faced such an awful dilemma.

Later in the program, MSNBC report Andrea Mitchell (wife of the conservative former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan) trotted out another line I've been hearing from our distinguished press corps: polls that show Obama ahead are good for the Republicans because Obama should be much farther ahead. As she put it:

[E]arlier polls from the week before and from two weeks ago, our own poll, ... showed less of a balance for Obama than you would have expected because we have all of this anger against the Republicans, we have all these headwinds against John McCain. It should not be as tight a race as the earlier polls were indicating. (my emphasis)

Mrs. Greenspan did not explain just who the "you" were that "would have expected" Obama to be doing even better than the polls that show him beating McCain. Though clearly someone in our exotic press tribe must have been expecting such a thing.

John Harwood echoed the views of his "friend" and New York Times colleague David Brooks in this weird way:

We have seen many tone changes from Barack Obama since he wrapped up the nomination--on taxes, said he might cut corporate taxes, might delay some tax hike; says he's a "free trader"; he made the decision on campaign finance. Look at this terror deal that went through the Congress and is going to be passed. That's a way of taking an issue off the table, and in the pragmatism that Barack Obama is displaying here, Democrats love the, the split personality that David Brooks...

MR. WILLIAMS: Mm-hmm.

MR. HARWOOD: ...my friend wrote about in his column. Liberals love that, and they're seeing, potentially, in Barack Obama, somebody, as your rock hero and Tim Russert's might say, was "born to run" in this campaign. (my emphasis)

They just make it up according to their scripts. It's astounding, even when someone is aware that it's the way they operate. Is there any evidence that the Democratic base in general admires Obama's appallingly bad position on the FISA bill and the accompanying telecom amnesty? Is any living, breathing Democrat saying, "Sure, we think Barack Obama is a schizophrenic, split-personality Black Panther Muslim who hates America and we love him for it?" Uh, no. Not in the real world, anyway.

Let's give Harwood a tiny bit of credit, though. He did manage to at least mention the FISA bill in passing, before they passed on to the far more consequential horse-race speculations about Vice Presidential picks. And if you wanted to stretch and be really generous, you might even twist some recognition out of his words that's there's nothing especially unusual about a Presidential candidate wanting to, you know, win the election.

But Over the Rainbow, the Lightbringers can create their own reality. With generous help from Republican friends like Mrs. Greenspan's husband, for instance.

Yes, our press corps is this broken. It ain't a pretty sight.

Since this post is already an orgy of Establishment press wisdom, we might as well include the latest from the Dean Of All The Pundits, the Melchizedek of High Broderism, the man himself: Getting to Know Obama by David "he's the Dean" Broder Washington Post 06/22/08. The Dean declares:

Obama leads on domestic, economic and social issues, but McCain is a strong favorite on national security and terrorism. The former POW's personal appeal looms as the strongest barrier to the Democratic victory indicated by the towering majorities that disapprove of President Bush (68 percent) and that fear the country is headed seriously on the wrong track (84 percent).

Despite those fundamental weaknesses in the Republican position, McCain trails Obama in that same poll by only six points, hardly an impossible margin to overcome. What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president. (my emphasis)

Give The Dean credit, too. He can compact several media scripts tightly together: the Republicans are always more trustworthy on national security (even when polls indicate differently); Obama should be much further ahead in the polls, for reasons known only to highly evolved Pundit Lightbringers; and, there's something about Obama that makes regular people uncomfortable, those regular "soddy buster" type people to whom Big Pundits give voice, something about him, something different, something strange and disturbing ...

Our greatest living saint is, of course, a man of unquestionable integrity and Maverickness. Says The Dean: "McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura."

Wow! McCain has an "aura", too! Translated into "soddy buster" speak, that would read, "McCain's shifts in his positions have not moved any of our pathetic excuse for a press corps to change our established script for him as the Straight Talking Maverick. No matter how little founded it reality it ever was, much less now". The Dean has spoken.

But that strange, exotic black man Democratic Presidential candidate has committed two great sins in the horse-race by the standards of High Broderism. Instead of agreeing unconditionally to the Maverick's proposal for a series of debates, Obama's campaign insists on negotiating about the details. The fact that every other campaign that ever held a series of debates also negotiated over them doesn't make this any less troubling a sign about Obama's deeply uncertain character. As on negotiations with Iran, I assume, the Straight Talker has taught his accolytes in the press that negotiation is a sign of wimpiness and surrender to Evil, while agreeing unconditionally to do what McCain demands is a sign of great virtue and solid character.

But The Dean almost outdoes himself on this next one. That's why he's The Dean:

At the same briefing, Gibbs and campaign counsel Bob Bauer defended Obama's decision to become the first presidential candidate since the Watergate reforms to decline public financing of his general election campaign.

Gibbs and Bauer in effect blamed McCain, saying repeatedly that he was "gaming the system" by pledging to accept public funds while saying he could not "referee" spending by outside independent groups if it occurred. In fact, McCain had been far more vocal in denouncing such groups on the GOP side than Obama was in criticizing their counterparts playing Democratic presidential politics - even though Obama has claimed the mantle of campaign finance reformer that McCain has long enjoyed. (my emphasis)

We less-evolved mortals naturally have a bit of difficulty assimilating such higher wisdom. McCain breaks the campaign financing laws and gives a transparently phony statement that he doesn't want 527's to run parallel campaigns. Obama actively demands that the 527's on the Democratic side cease separate operations and support the central campaign instead; plus, he's obeying the campaign finance laws. And all this is a sign of, once more, McCain's great virtue and sterling character and the very troubling state of Obama's conscience, character and psychiatric condition.

The Dean closes by reminding us how deeply strange and troubling Obama is:

By refusing to join McCain in these initiatives in order to protect his own interests, Obama raises an important question: Has he built sufficient trust so that his motives will be accepted by the voters who are only now starting to figure out what makes him tick? (my emphasis)

The Dean has spoken. There's something about Obama...

Even a veteran of the old East German TV news would surely be embarassed to say things in public like our Big Pundits regularly say without the slightest sign of embarassment.

And, let's not forget that in the Republican Bizarro World, the PBS Newshour, MSNBC, David Broder and the Washington Post are all pillars of the liberal press.

Future generations will study this time. And they will rightfully challenge their teachers and professors about whether their textbooks are accurate, because how could the press corps in the wealthiest and most militarily powerful country in the world ever have become this weirdly dysfunctional? I'm even hopeful that future generations of American students will get to study this and ask those questions. Yes, I'm a wild-eyed optimist somewhere deep down.

Tags: david broder, david brooks, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, mark shields

Paying homage to the Saviour-General

Europa and the [White] Bull - Gustave Moreau, 1869)

It really is remarkable how dysfunctional our Establishment media have become. Glenn Greenwald in Limitless wrongness Salon 09/18/07 chronicles some of the press atrocities surrounding the long-awaited testimony of our Saviour-General David Petraeus before Congress.

There is, of course, David Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, who is no doubt looking for a new outburst of moderation. Greenwald cites his column Bush Regains His Footing of February 15 of this year in the Washington Post as an example of the basic Big Pundit script:

Like President Bill Clinton after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Bush has gone through a period of wrenching adjustment to his reduced status. But just as Clinton did in the winter of 1995, Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

More important, he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge. ...

With the public eager for some bipartisan progress on all these fronts, Bush is signaling that he, at least, is ready to try.

More evidence than Broder snoozes through most of the actual news.

Dean Broder doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that the Republicans in Congress stubbornly refuse to put any limits at all on Bush's Iraq War. But in the Church of High Broderism, "moderation" is the highest virtue. And in that denomination's version, "moderation" means that Democrats go along with Bush's most fool ideas and attack other Democrats who are opposed to doing so.

Greenwald treats us some classic moments from the Chris Matthews show of guys drooling over our Saviour-General Peraeus' manly uniform. Here's advertising executive Jerry Della Femina:

Well, they're doing a good job of it this week. Let me tell you, they couldn't find anyone better than Petraeus. I mean, you just can't beat a man in full uniform speaking to - well, I'll give you Ollie North facing the Congress. You know, you stand up there, and he's wearing a uniform. And boy, you can't take a guy in uniform versus six overweight senators. ...

And Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (not to be confused with Dana Priest, who generally does more solid reporting):

MILBANK: Bush had a terrible August down on the ranch and then has explosive Septembers. And I think he's won this battle already.

MATTHEWS: How so?

MILBANK: Petraeus - it's no accident he had a Latin name. It looked like he was the Roman general returning to the republic in his gold and purple toga, and they were celebrating him and slaying white bulls. They could not get enough of this man. And anybody's who's even critical of the war wouldn't dare criticize...

MATTHEWS: Right.

MILBANK: ... except in the most polite way, General Petraeus because then you appear to be criticizing the troops. I think it's game, set and match here.

Celebrating him and slaying white bulls? You stand up there - and our Saviour-General is wearing an uniform!!

It reads like a comedy routine. That's because our mainstream press is to a shocking extent a sad joke.

Greenwald observes that according to the poll results, our Saviour-General Petreaus had virtually no effect on public opinion on the war, slain white bulls notwithstanding. David Kurtz has more polling results along the same lines in Petraeus Barely Registers TPM 09/18/07.

Greenwald argues:

Most of the media still believes - based in part on how they have been trained and in part on their hopes - that the Bush movement, any day now, will re-discover its glory and magic and get the country back on its side with regard to the war. It took them a long time to accept the reality that the country had abandoned the Leader and the War, and ever since then, they have continuously been predicting a reversal. ...

In their world, the Republicans are always ascendent [sic], Bush is always the Strong Leader, Democrats are always the sorry losers captive to their destructive Leftist extremists, and Americans are aching to support the War. They have been predicting endlessly that, any day now, all of this will be true again.

It's not that the Establishment media are being intentionally so crassly partisan; it's a more deep-seated and disturbing phenemenon than that, it appears.

And I would find it hard to argue with this conclusion of Greenwald's:

They haven't been this in awe of anyone as they are of Gen. Petraeus since Oliver North proudly justified his lawbreaking, nor as outraged as they are over the MoveOn ad since Bill Clinton had oral sex.

If only they had managed to muster even a small fraction of the outrage and offense over the war itself, or the radicalism and lawlessness of this administration. But that would have proven how Unserious they are. It is much more rewarding to show that they are the Serious, Responsible establishment members who lavish the General with the honor and reverence he deserves while scorning the insufficiently respectful leftist radicals.

"Leftist radicals" in this case being the majority of the country who want the United States out of this war sooner rather than later.

Tags: dana milbank, david broder, glenn greenwald, iraq war, jerry della femina, petraeus

Defending the Dean

Rightwing columnist Kathleen Parker, who specializes in providing white folks a "respectable" vocabulary to whine about blacks, turns her attention to David Broder's column on Harry Reid and the surprisingly united response of the Senate Democrats to it in Banal outrage San Francisco Chronicle 05/04/07. What Parker learned from that episode is ... bloggers are mean and uncivilized.

Creative, you say? Not really. It's just the standard complaint of journalists about bloggers, particularly liberal bloggers. What was interesting about Parker's complaint is that it shows how nervous she is about the Senators' response. She's about as explicit as one could expect, surprisingly explicit I would say, about her nervousness over the fact that Senate Democrats saw the need to fight the press over false "scripts" that aid the Republicans.

You'll recall that David Broder, the Dean Of All The Pundits, did a column in which he compared Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the very memory-challenged Republican Attorney General, Abu Gonzales: The Democrats' Gonzales Washington Post 04/26/07. His column opened like this:

Here's a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats - a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.

If you answered "Harry Reid," give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end. (my emphasis)

Now, I can't claim to do a daily representative survey of the liberal blogosphere. But the Democratic bloggers I saw addressing this column focused on two things primarily. One was what a lame-brained comparison it was on the face of it. The other was the clear implication that Broder knew in his esteemed role as Dean Of All The Pundits that there was a "long line" of Democratic Senators who were eager to have Reid alleged exhibition of "ineptitude" end. This strongly implies without precisely saying so that some Democratic Senators are ready to oust Reid as leader.

I realize I'm covering some of the same ground as I did in an earlier post. But the Dean's pronouncement on Harry Reid is a gift that keeps on giving.

Problem is, when other reporters went out to follow up on this, astonishingly they couldn't find any evidence of this widespread discontent with Reid's leadership among Democratic Senators! And then the Senators themselves sent a letter to the Post expressing confidence in and support for Reid: Sen. Reid's Fine Leadership 04/27/07. The Dean Of All The Pundits got caught more-or-less making s*** up, in other words.

In the exotic corner of reality which Kathleen Parker's consciousness inhabits, David Broder is part of the Liberal Press Conspiracy against George Bush the Commander Guy, the Republican Party, and all other things godly and wholesome. But pundit solidarity summoned her to the battlements to defend the Dean against those dirty hippies in the blogosphere, in the Senate Democratic Caucus and wherever else they might rear their hairy heads. And when I referred to Parker's corner of "reality", that wasn't a typo. Because she did show in this column that she is actually capable of registering the reality outside her head, at least this one time:

From the assault subsequently directed at Broder - from other journalists, political operatives, left-wing bloggers and even the entire 50-member Senate Democratic Caucus - you'd have thought Broder had had an intimate encounter with an intern. ...
Broder committed no such dastardly deed, but merely did what he has done for the past 35 years. He called it as he saw it - just as Reid claims to have done, and that his defenders seem to find so refreshing.

Nevertheless, the 50 Democratic senators felt compelled to respond. Doesn't the U.S. Senate have more important matters to attend to than David Broder?

Of course, her actual perception of reality is nearly smothered by being wrapped in Bill and Monica - these people are just never going to stop drooling over the Starr Report porn, are they? But she actually managed to see what happened, if only through a glass darkly.

And that is, the Democrats fought back against Establishment press misconduct. If they hadn't, by the time the Sunday morning gabfests rolled around, the phony Broder script would have had taken on a life of it's own, and we would have been seeing things like: "How Serious Is the Democratic Revolt Against Harry Reid?" "Harry Reid: On His Way Out as Leader?" "Can Harry Reid Recover From His Missteps?"

It's also worth remembering that although the Dean Of All The Pundits was picking up on a Republican/FOXist/OxyContin-radio meme about Reid's "lost" comment, the Dean added his own twist to it: the Senate Democrats want to get rid of this guy. It's not just that he was echoing a Republican partisan theme, which he was. It's that he was adding his impeccably Establishment primature as the Dean Of All The Pundits to a claim that was false, that there was some kind of live sentiment to get rid of Reid as Majority Leader that not only was happening but was comparable in intensity to Republican dismay of Abu Gonzales' meltdown.

Again, this wasn't "the rightwing" inventing this story. This was the Dean Of All The Pundits writing in the Washington Post, our Pravda on the Potomoc. And the Senate Democrats realized that this was malicious enough and potentially enough enough damaging to their message that they stomped it out. Right away. The Democrats are going to have to fight the Establishment press scripts like this for a long time if they are ever going to be able to do the things that need to get done.

Naturally, Kathleen Parker doesn't process it exactly that way. She is so shocked, shocked to see the Democrats giving so much attention to shooting down a dysfunctional and phony press script that she apparently blocked out all memory of the constant, non-stop, often-hysterical ranting from Republicans for the last, oh, 40-some years about the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! But let's give her a break. That's become such a part of the landscape that it's practically background noise. But Democrats taking on our "press corps" for their dysfunction - that is something that's more unusual!

Parker said that their reaction was "unusual, if not unprecedented". She's gasping in astonishment. But she tsks-tsks that it "betrays a disturbing hostility to legitimate criticism." No, this is not the Onion. After the antics of the war cheerleaders these last several years with their blasts of venom at anyone daring to criticize Dear Leader Bush and his war of liberation in Iraq, we can only marvel that the Senators' straightforward, brief statement calling out the Dean for just making stuff up shows Parker a "hostility to legitimate criticism."

My favorite comment in this column is Parker's shocked, "Though Broder is a great political writer, he is not the president of the United States." Lord only knows what sort of firing of neurons in her brain produced that cryptic statement.

What does all this have to do with mean bloggers, you ask? Well, I was going to explain it. But when I looked again at how she got there, it doesn't make much sense. It's something about how bloggers are often anonymous, and this led Paul Begala to criticize the Dean Of All The Pundits, even though Begala wasn't anonymous, and, well, you know, bloggers are bad. Especially the liberal kind. And we need lofty-minded thinkers like Kathleen Parker and the Dean Of All The Pundits to sort through this complicated political stuff for us:

One wonders where these same [dirty hippie blogger] thin-skins were when Broder was leveling his sights at the Bush administration. Was Broder a gasbag when previously he lambasted the Bush budget deficit, the tax cuts for the rich and the mess in Iraq?

You hippie bloggers didn't realize that the Dean has been an aggressive critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq War, did you? Like I said, in Parker's world, the Dean is part of the Liberal Press Conspiracy whether or not any real live liberals think of him that way.

A fair treatment [from legitimate journalists, not hippie blogging "thin-skins"] of Broder's recent column would consider the broader context of his body of work, but fairness is missing from this debate [because the doggone dirty hippies in the Senate and the blogosphere are mucking it all up by putting their tie-dyed nonsense out there]. Also [missing] is respect for those, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broder, who have toiled long in the fields to earn the kind of forum others [you know, hippies, thin-skins, flower-power protesters] merely feel entitled to.

The absence of fairness and respectful dissension [from the dirty rude hippies] - and the decline of civility wrought by our nation's [hippies running-wild] unhinged narcissism - now there's something worthy of outrage.

Yes, why can't those dang blogging hippies be civil like Kathleen Parker? Look at how she started off her column. She didn't even use the word "blowjob" when she brought up Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton out of the blue. Yes, we disgusting bloggers could learn some manners, and high-minded political thinking, too, from our betters like Parker and the Dean.

Does that mean we get to make stuff up, too? If not only Rush but the Dean Of All The Pundits can do it, it must be all right, huh?

Tags: david broder, kathleen parker

The Senate Democrats and the Dean Of All The Pundits

Glenn Greenwald asks if we're seeing A genuine political sea change? Salon 04/28/07. He's referring among other thingsto last week's drama around David Broder, the Dean Of All The Pundits.

Broder wrote a Washington Post column trashing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and strong implying (though without specifically saying) that quite a few Senate Democrats were ready to dump him as leader.

Some real reporters then following up and actually talked to Senate Democrats and couldn't uncover any sign of this brewing party revolt. Then, all 50 of Reid's Democratic Senate colleagues - yes, even including Holy Joe Liberman! - signed a letter to the Post praised Reid's leadership and expressing their confidence in him.

Now anyone remotely familiar with the Democratic Party knows that it's a near-miracle for all the Dems in one of the Congressional Houses to agree on anything. He sees that as one sign among several that the Dems are ready to buck "Wise Beltway Wisdom, which endlessly warns them not to adhere to their beliefs too steadfastly or to defy Republican decrees, especially on foreign policy". And I'm willing to be cautiously optimistic on that score, too.

But what is particularly significant to me about the Senate Dems' letter to the Post is that they realized they had to fight the press in this instance, and not let the long-braindead Of All The Pundits get a new press script started about how Reid is embarassing the Dems, is out of touch with his caucus, and yadda, yadda. These phony press scripts have been devastating to Democrats the last 15 years. So let's hope this new habit is more than a passing moment!

Tags: david broder, harry reid