Weeping for Juan.

I got a chuckle out of this note by writer Peter Grier in a Christian Science Monitor blog post this morning about the much overblown and eminently stupid firing of Juan Williams by NPR...

The bulk of [NPR funding] comes from affiliate stations, corporate sponsors, and donations from individuals made to feel very guilty after they tune in to hear "Morning Edition" and find out it is fundraising week.

True 'dat.

The firing was about as bungled an effort as you'll ever see, but the idea that seems to be taking hold that it will have big political implications seems nearly as silly as the act it self. Yes, it will surely fire up the base base (not a typo, consider the first an adjective), but does anybody really think there is any significant number of people out there who give a damn and will change their votes because of this? Does anybody think more than a small portion of the base base (see, it's easy once you get the hang of it) even knows what NPR is? The funniest stuff to come out of all this are letters and calls to stations around the country by true believers saying they will never "watch" NPR again. That'll teach 'em.

Honestly, Williams should have been fired long ago, not just because his role on Fox is in obvious conflict with the stated NPR standards but mostly because his analysis was the sort of mealy-mouthed pap that NPR already has more than enough of.

I am curious, I must admit, as to whether that $2 million contract with Fox that was signed the next day had been in the works for a while or was an in-your-face move. And, either way, how does somebody who thinks Juan Williams is worth a multi-million contract keep his job?

Brilliant.

The original is here.

Sometimes they don't have a clue what are saying. At least I hope not.

The Ed Show on MSNBC is as perfect a reverse mirror reflection as you'll find of the sort of crap you see on Fox News every night, totally political and partisan. Indeed, when the host periodically trots out shameless GOP strategist Ron Christie to be the right side of a left-right he said/he said segment and all the participants giggle back and forth as they reveal they are all the same, knowing what each side is going to say, it becomes vomit-inducing.

Tonight, after just such a five minutes of dreck, Ed Schultz welcomed Rhode Island Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse to discuss the issue of why, now that Nancy Pelosi is calling back the House to finish the jobs bill, the Democrat leadership in the Senate doesn't do the same and at least ratify the House's work so the bill can pass into law this month.

This was Whitehouse's answer, not verbatim, but substantially correct:

"Well, you know, Ed, with all the amendments and obstruction that would take a full week and there are a lot of members who have elections and it's an American tradition that you go home and take care of things and take care of your campaign..."

Um, senator...

Bullshit!

We do not elect our senators so that they can insure be re-elected. We do not elect them to make sure they have a job next year.

We elect you people to do the job this year.

This. Damned. Year.

I might be terribly disappointed if my senator gets beaten in his next election. I will take every action of which I am capable to make sure that does not happen if I believe he is representing my and the nation's best interests (not necessarily in that order).

But you tell me that a major piece of legislation which can benefit millions of Americans by creating news jobs in the midst of the worst economic conditions since the Depression is not more important than US senators trying to preserve their own jobs, then you, sir, are a disgrace.

And you should be ashamed, if that is still possible.

Things to think about for those who bother to think at all.

Here's an interesting tidbit from this morning's Mike Allen's Politico Playbook, the mover-and-shaker email for the Washington press corps and the TV talking heads (yes, thee are the words of a partisan source but truth is where you find it):

A TOP DEM. STRATEGIST phoned while reading the Sunday papers to say that “Week in Review” was really “Bush in Review,” between David E. Sanger's cover piece about years of “seriously flawed” Afghanistan strategy; http://nyti.ms/9IR0Hr David Stockman's Op-Ed blaming the modern Republican Party for “serial financial bubbles”; http://nyti.ms/bNn416 and the lead editorial, about the “alarming” deficit: http://nyti.ms/cX9XSK “It was really about the legacy we're all dealing with right now.” 

Plus also, as we say on the internets, there's this a bit further down in that same email:

--Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, “Raise My Taxes, Mr. President!”: “The Bush tax cuts remain the single largest cause of America's structural deficit-that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenues when the economy goes into recession. … The simple fact is this: all the Bush tax cuts were unaffordable. They were an irresponsible act of hubris enacted during an economic boom. … We have in front of us a simple, easy way to bring America's fiscal house in order, reduce our dependence on foreign borrowing, restore U.S. credibility and power, and give us a stable revenue base from which to make key investments for future growth. All we need is for Congress to do what it does so well-nothing.” http://bit.ly/cOu4IR

Of course, we all know that the nation's problems rest solely on the fact that the current resident of the Oval Office is an imposter who is not even a citizen and may well not even be human at all and a secret plot by a handful of evil liberals to turn us into a fascist dictatorship (Yeah, I know; don't try to make sense of it), but still, maybe some of the Liberal Media Elite might want to pay some attention. If they do, of course, it will be in he said/she said mode so little light will be shed, but at least that beats around-the-clock coverage of the latest Palin bleat tweet or right-wing fantasy.

Congratulations to Fox News, by the way, for gaining the empty front row seat at White House briefings. The White House Press Association has thereby certified them as an actual news organization rather than a political propaganda machine and that must make them very proud...not to mention laugh hysterically.

Three for three.

Frank Rich joins in the (successful, I'd say) effort to make the Times' Op-Ed Page a "must read" today. In this column about the firing of General McChrystal, he mentions something I wanted to write about earlier this week and never got to...

Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.” 

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the “slam-dunk” W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.

The fatuousness of the Washington Press corps becomes more evident and magnified every day. Did anybody see the White House press conference during which media superstar David Gregory was baffled--baffled, I say--by the concept of the White House wanting to have safeguard to insure that BP was going to do what it promised to do? "But, but...," he sputtered, "you're partners."

Which, of course (and tragically), is how the press sees itself vis-a-vis our political class. We're all pals here, no need to call anybody to account...

God forbid.

"We learn nothing. Ever."

The inimitable Charles Pierce, in his weekly Friday email to Eric Alterman's Altercation website, sums up the character and brainpower of the Worst. President. Ever. and the state of American politics and morality in one astounding paragraph:

I don't know if anyone else missed it, but the previous president of the United States admitted to complicity in a war crime the other day In fact, he bragged about his complicity in a war crime the other day. (He also announced that his greatest disappointment was that he didn't get to wreck Social Security the way he helped wreck the rest of the economy and the constitutional order. The man remains an almost limitless vista of ignorance. He's also a sadistic pig.) This, of course, is in no way a scandal on the order of The Sestak Affair or anything. This, of course, is what you get when all you want to do is Look Forward, Not Back. (And also what you get when you -- shh! -- pretty clearly want to keep your own options open.) I was thinking just the other day what towering lies we tell ourselves everytime a major, genuine scandal comes to a conclusion about the lessons we all have learned from the events in question. Bullshit. We learn nothing. Ever. Watergate is almost 40 years ago now, and a guy named Andrew Breitbart hires a smarmy little arachnid and turns Donald Segretti's ratfucking into a career. He even draws an overly laudatory profile in Time magazine. Do we even have to count the number of ways Iran-Contra taught us next to nothing? Hell, the only people who learned anything were the criminals themselves, and all they learned was how not to get caught the next time, which can fairly be defined as The Bush Administration. We didn't even really learn anything from the useless pursuit of Bill Clinton's libido. We still fall for the same kind of grifters and poltroons who were the grist for The Arkansas Project. (Watch what happens if the Republicans regain the majority in the House.) We are progressively less mature as a self-governing political commonwealth almost by the hour. And now, a guy we elected twice can get paid big money to brag about his complicity in crimes for which we hung Japanese generals, and nobody bats an eye, let alone calls a cop. Donald Segretti, alas, died too soon.

Your Liberal Media Elite will save America with its wisdom (part two).

The Economist thinks that Maureen Dowd is a dipshit.The sad part is that this will come as a shock to many.

If you ever wondered how the media got to be the disreputable, disrespected, disinterested shadow of its former self that it is, and you haven't read this, you ought to. Right now. Anna Marie Cox is a Dowd clone, only more virtual.

Obama's Katrina?

That was an early meme the right wing tried to introduce into the political dialogue when it became apparent that the gummint had no real idea how to deal with the BP oil spill. It caught on briefly--I saw it take root slightly when a right-inclined pal who usually has no interest in politics telephone breathlessly and those were the first words out of his mount. Wiser heads in the GOP eventually prevailed, it seems. Do they really want to bring back "Heckuva job, Brownie" and that classic photo of the Worst. President. Ever. flying high above the destruction five days too late?

That said, it's not a bad question to ask, not because the other side is, or was, pushing it, but because the White House has allowed itself to appear disconnected from the issue, lackadaisical was James Carville's devastating word for it, and doing a lot of talking but not much walking.

Perception or reality? And, in politics, does it really matter either way?

The evil among us.

The evil billionaire businessman or the evil corporation have been been staples of crime fiction since the middle of the last century, right after we got over all that gray-flannel-suit melodrama, and of more mainstream fiction for at least half that time. Such entities always used to seem somewhat overblown and sensationalized. No longer.

In the age of Halliburton and BP Oil, of Wall Street criminals and health care liars, in a time when great national banks have pissed away a significant portion of our wealth with risky and self-serving schemes, it has become more obvious than ever to anyone paying a modicum of attention that true evil lives among us. Such characters are all too real. If anything, the malevolence and disinterest in anything other than putting more money in their own coffers at any cost manifested by "corporate" sorts make most of those fictional versions almost laughably ineffective and short-sighted.

Oddly though, with all the evidence right there before our lyin' eyes, the same large minority of the population which suffers most from the machinations of connivers at the very top is still buying in to the self-serving myths propagated by big business and big media, still clinging to the idea that somehow allowing the rich to become richer and businesses to be entirely unfettered will work to their benefit in the long run.

That this condition still persists, indeed prevails, is an example of mind control beyond the visionary capabilities of most practitioners of fiction. George Orwell's 1984 and the host of anti-Utopian novels which followed in its wake envision a beaten and defeated populace held down by drugs or military forces or some other physical manifestation of power. But it was much simpler than that. All it took was a constant drumbeat of misinformation and the acquiescence of the comfortable. Which is to say, you and me.

The manipulators of what the average American sees and (much less often and  much more selectively) reads have managed to inculcate their message so thoroughly and completely that it is seen in many quarters as Un-American to even question that version of reality even at the edges, much less to challenge it openly. The Tepid Middle and the Timid Left bow before the roaring, if empty, winds of talk radio and Fox News. The Bright New Hope in the White House seems more and more The Conciliatory Overseer, the occasional flash of anger quickly erased by day-to-day policies which, in the face of all evidence, seem founded in a numbing belief that there is a way to reconcile with those who feast on the growing and continually stoked anger that threatens the very principles of the nation with platitudes and watered-down fixes.

We are becoming a nation which prizes ignorance above all else, just so long as it coincides with our own uninformed world view, because is easier and more comfortable than the truth. We rail against the present and long for a past that never was, all the while refusing to see who was to blame and how we got here.

It is a time when Dick Cheney, a creature who would have made Dr. Strangelove cringe in fear, was once the most powerful man in the country and remains a behind-the-scenes force for all that is wrong in our natures. That snarling visage is the face of the nation. God help us all.

"Continuity easily turns into inertia."

I have spent a lot of time in recent weeks trying to figure out exactly what I think about Barack Obama and his presidency at this point. Garry Wills' review of David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review suggests that the manner of his rise to the Oval Office  hold the key to understanding why his first year in office, the time when a landslide victor with both charisma and party control of the Congress might have been expected to achieve a myriad of goals, was instead marked by turmoil and disappointment.

Yes, the mindless obstructionism and near-criminal demonization of the new president by his opponents played a crucial role and the ruined economic landscape left him by his inept and disinterested predecessor played an an even larger part. But it was not only exterior forces that thwarted Obama.

His long, foolish and obviously doomed effort for "bipartisanship," as if it were some sort of moral value rather than merely a political tactic, allowed much of the energy to escape from his historic election. Many of the people he surrounded himself with, especially on his economic team, had played significant roles in the disaster that may yet bring him down. The fire and passion of his arguments for new policies and directions, until very recently, was dimmed.

The central theme of Remnick's books, from all accounts, is that Obama's solution to his always being the outsider, the newcomer, has been to ingratiate himself by the oldest social rule of them all, to get along, go along. And especially in seeking the presidency and then assuming the Oval Office, that predilection was often paramount. He could never risk being the Angry Black Man on the campaign trail; he wanted above all to embed his presidency in the long history of the office even if it was undeniably a demarcation from all that had gone before.

Wills is one of my favorite intellectuals and the final two paragraphs of his review provide a summary of what he took from The Bridge and what that might portend:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

The last time this sad excuse of a nation and what it used to be awoke from its stupor and put someone in charge to pick up the pieces left in wake of a destructive Republican non-stewardship of the nation, we chose The Man from Hope. If it turns out that this time we've chosen The Man form Inertia, then the broken heart of hope could turn out to be the least of the pain we will reap.

Eric Cantor is a wimp and a fool. [Update]

Long ago, in another life, I owned a bookstore with a large plate glass front window. One night there came a call from the local police around 3AM. "Somebody shot a hole through your window."

When I got to the store, there was a small, perfect bullethole through the top of the window, with cracks extending outward. Bad, but not so much that the whole thing would shatter before I could get somebody to do something about it. A search inside uncovered a spent bullet lying next to a book rack, a very faint, almost invisible mark where it had string the rack's side.

Have any enemies, they asked? Not the kind that would shoot me, I hope.

Not to worry, was the answer. Given the hour and the downward trajectory of the bullet and the fact that it had no impetus when it hit, this was clearly the work of some idiot firing his gun into the air and it fell he knew not where.

This was obviously an accident, not an attack.

Update: How about that?

History.

I may not be here to see it (or may not be able to understand it if I am here), but history is being made this weekend and in the days to follow.

Make no mistake about it, this will be one of those times which, as the nuns used to threaten (and as nuns perhaps helped make possible now), will go onto the permanent record. Because of what is happening in Washington now and in the hours ahead, America will be a better place and this moment will be seen as laying the groundwork for many changes to follow.

This is a turning point and those who are on the wrong side of history will pay the price.

Perhaps sooner than they might think, say this November?

We ignore reality at our peril.

The comments below are excepts from today's column by Frank Rich in the New York Times.

Rich is often all too facile and in search of the clever phrase or image in lieu of serious commentary, and he will forever be tainted by his part in the smarmy smearing of Al Gore in 2000 (together with colleagues Maureen Dowd, Ceci Connolly & "Stenographer Sue" Schmidt), but he often indicates a solid historical perspective and, from my point of view, he is very much on target today.

We live in very dangerous times and they echo a very bad time in our recent history:

Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

[T]he unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled "patriots" to sow havoc.

[M]ost Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

At [CPAC]'s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as "conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.

Heatlh Care Debate captivates nation. And the winner is...

It's the Democratic way.

NOW he starts to make sense and talks tough.

50 Most Loathsome Americans, 2009.

This is quite a list.

The top of their game is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

In this week''s New Yorker, David Packer uses Old Man Broder's love poem to Sarah Palin following the Tea Party speech ("a public figure at the top of her game") to skewer what passes for journalism among the almost useless Washington Press Corps:

Broder wasn’t analyzing Palin’s positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesn’t seem in the least bit odd, and it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way. A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran a piece by its lead political reporter, Adam Nagourney, about a Republican strategy session in Hawaii: “Here in Honolulu, the strains within the party over conservative principles versus political pragmatism played out in a sharp and public way, especially as the party establishment struggled to deal with the demands of the Tea Party movement.” The structure of the sentence, and of the article, puts the emphasis entirely on tactics and performance. This kind of prose goes down as easily and unnoticeably as a glass of sparkling water, with no aftertaste. Readers interested in politics drink quarts of it every day without gaining weight. And Broder and Nagourney are at the top of their game.

The best part of it is when he shows us how one of the villagers* would cover Hamid Karzai in Pakistan.

*The concept of Washington as an insular village in which the inhabitants, especially the press, write mostly for and about themselves and share the same conventional wisdom is an internet meme which provides an easy shortcut for sayin "the chattering class," "TV gasbags" and/or "pompous self-centered asses" all at once.