The Wonder of Big Media Journalism

CBS News said yesterday it planned to install a new level of editorial oversight to its Web site since revelations that the CBS anchor Katie Couric read a plagiarized commentary on the site last week.

Link.

A sign of the times, of course: An anchor needs a commentary written for her; she has no real opinion other than what some young snot without enough sense not to plagiarize like in high school and college writes for.

Incredible.

Incredible, really, that anyone relies on the Big Media broadcasts for any information or insight (other than the video).

Maybe it's me but maybe CBS that try hard news accurately reported. You know, get out of the pandering business....

The OoMM Competition

Who does this apply too?

...should have been fired from the jump, not just because of these remarks but because his show has long been a safe haven for racist and sexist comments....

Presidential Portrait of the Day

Firm? Resolute? Crapping in his pants at the disaster he has enabled if not created and is too weak and/or dumb to correct? You decide!

U.S. Counter-Counterterrorism Unit Successfully Destroys Washington Monument
April 11, 2007 | Issue 43•15

WASHINGTON, DC—The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that its Counter-Counterterrorism Unit successfully carried out its largest and most complex anti-anti-terror exercise to date, destroying the Washington Monument in a massive explosion that left 122 dead, dozens more injured, and the area around the National Mall a chaotic scene of smoke and debris.

"We learned from Sept. 11 that we can't just sit back and wait for the terrorists to attack us," said DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff at a press conference held in front of an on-site triage tent, gesturing to the blackened stump of the 122-year-old obelisk as divers pulled bodies from the nearby reflecting pool. "We still have a lot of work to do, but this operation exceeded our expectations. If we hadn't destroyed the Washington Monument today, we would never have known how vulnerable it was to attack."

"Now it can never be destroyed by terrorists," Chertoff added.

[More.]

Vox Populi: One Voice

From the Journal's Question of the Day blog:

Election in ’08? Never happen!

Dick Cheney has been authorized by the leadership of the New World Order to declare Marshall Law in October ’08 and suspend elections indefinitely.

In December of ’08 all of the Democrats in both houses will be arrested on charges of subversion and they will be replaced by GOP yes-men specially chosen by Ken Mehlman, Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson and John Hagee.

In January ’09, rather than an inauguration of the next President, George Bush will be declared President for life and Dick Cheney will be Supreme Leader in Chief For Ever.

Political candidates and national elections are so 20TH Century. The Corporate Leadership of the world is much more capable of taking care of the big decisions.

Don’t worry, over time you will learn to like it.

The Voice of the People: Our Leaders are Wrong

[A]s Greg Sargent notes today, a new Los Angeles Times poll suggests that withholding funds for the war isn't quite the "third rail" of American politics that we assumed it was.

The Times' pollsters asked respondents what Congress should do if the president vetoes, as he says he will, the "emergency" supplemental spending bill with a withdrawal timeline attached. Forty-three percent of the respondents said Congress should respond by approving what the president would call a "clean" bill -- which is to say, funding for the war without any verbiage about when it should end. But slightly more, 45 percent, said that Congress should stand by its guns and refuse to approve any more war funding until the president agrees to "accept conditions for withdrawal."

Now, 45 percent does not a majority make, but the poll should give Democrats in Congress confidence that cutting off funding for the war isn't the political impossibility a lot of us might have thought it was. And there's something else interesting in the Times' numbers: Twenty-one percent of Republicans say Congress shouldn't send Bush more money for the war until he buys into a withdrawal.

Link.

And speaking of the genius that is Our Beloved Leader, see this.

American Justice, Our Leaders' Style

I am posting the below with the permission of Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.

"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."

"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."

"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they=re going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical."

"I confess to having been furious that any American citizen would be singled out for governmental harassment because he or she criticized any elected official, Democrat or Republican. That harassment is, in and of itself, a flagrant violation not only of the First Amendment but also of our entire scheme of constitutional government. This effort to punish a critic states my lecture's argument far more eloquently and forcefully than I ever could. Further, that an administration headed by two men who had "had other priorities" than to risk their own lives when their turn to fight for their country came up, should brand as a threat to the United States a person who did not run away but stood up and fought for his country and was wounded in battle, goes beyond the outrageous. Although less lethal, it is of the same evil ilk as punishing Ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticizing Bush's false claims by "outing" his wife, Valerie Plaime, thereby putting at risk her life as well as the lives of many people with whom she had had contact as an agent of the CIA. ..."

"I have a personal stake here, but so do all Americans who take their political system seriously. Thus I hope you and your colleagues will take some positive action to bring the Administration's conduct to the attention of a far larger, and more influential, audience than I could hope to reach. "

Link.

Our Leader's Perspective

No principle, just just partisan dishonesty:

As the president spent Easter weekend in Crawford, the White House Communications Office noted that 61 days -- now it's 63 -- have passed since he first gave Congress his "emergency" supplemental spending request for the war in Iraq.

Never mind, for a moment, the fact that 119 days passed between the time George W. Bush submitted and Bush signed the 2006 emergency supplemental -- and never mind, for a moment, that Republicans were in control of Congress then.

Here are some other numerical measures worth considering. Ten more U.S. troops were killed in Iraq over the weekend. The U.S. death toll in Iraq so far this month stands at 35; if the current pace of killings continues, April 2007 will be the deadliest month in Iraq for U.S. troops since November 2004. And the total U.S. death toll in Iraq to date: 3,282.

Outside an Easter service at Ford Hood, Texas, Sunday, the president said he prays for peace.

Link.

Our Leaders in Action

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.

Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove's once-vaunted White House operation.

Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on bribery charges and is now in prison for fraud.

Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove's office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House.

The prospect that such communication might become public has further jangled the nerves of an already rattled Bush White House.

Some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration's far-flung political activities than has previously been available.

***

Waxman told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that a separate "e-mail system for high-ranking White House officials would raise serious questions about violations of the Presidential Records Act," which requires the preservation and ultimate disclosure of e-mails about official government business.

[More.]

More Straight Talk

Frank Rich:

John McCain's April Fools’ Day stroll through Baghdad’s Shorja market last weekend was instantly acclaimed as a classic political pratfall. Protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest, the senator extolled the “progress” and “good news” in Iraq. Befitting this loopy brand of comedy — reminiscent of “Wedding Crashers,” in which Mr. McCain gamely made a cameo appearance — the star had a crackerjack cast of supporting buffoons: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told reporters “I bought five rugs for five bucks!,” and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”

Five rugs for five bucks: boy, we’ve really got that Iraq economy up and running now! No wonder the McCain show was quickly dubbed “McCain’s Mission Accomplished” and “McCain’s Dukakis-in-the-Tank Photo Op.” But at a certain point the laughter curdled. Reporters rudely pointed out there were 60-plus casualties in this market from one February attack alone and that six Americans were killed in the Baghdad environs on the day of his visit. “Your heart goes out to just the typical Iraqi because they can’t have that kind of entourage,” said Kyra Phillips of CNN. The day after Mr. McCain’s stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market’s merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.

***

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to “pass emergency funds for our troops” even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for “pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war,” though last year’s war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president’s own request for money for bird-flu preparation.

Mr. Bush’s claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn’t sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we’ll already be on the threshold of our own commanders’ late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what’s the crisis?

The president then ratcheted up his habitual exploitation of the suffering of the troops and their families — a button he had pushed five days earlier when making his six-weeks-tardy visit to pose for photos at scandal-ridden Walter Reed. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines,” he said. “And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to.”

His own failures had already foreordained exactly these grim results. Only the day before this news conference, the Pentagon said that the first unit tossed into the Baghdad surge would stay in Iraq a full year rather than the expected nine months, and that three other units had been ordered back there without the usual yearlong stay at home. By week’s end, we would learn the story of the suspected friendly-fire death of 18-year-old Pvt. Matthew Zeimer, just two hours after assuming his first combat post. He had been among those who had been shipped to war with a vastly stripped-down training regimen, 10 days instead of four weeks, forced by the relentless need for new troops in Iraq.

Meanwhile the Iraqi “democracy” that Mr. Zeimer died for was given yet another free pass. Mr. Bush applauded the Iraqi government for “working on an oil law,” though it languishes in Parliament, and for having named a commander for its Baghdad troops. Much of this was a replay of Mr. Bush’s sunny Rose Garden news conference in June, only then he claimed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was taking charge of Baghdad security on his own. Now it’s not even clear whom the newly named Iraqi commander is commanding. The number of military operations with Iraqis in the lead is falling, not rising, according to the Pentagon. Even as the administration claims that Iraqis are leading the Baghdad crackdown, American military losses were double those of the Iraqi Army in March.

Mr. Bush or anyone else who sees progress in the surge is correct only in the most literal and temporary sense. Yes, an influx of American troops is depressing some Baghdad violence. But any falloff in the capital is being offset by increased violence in the rest of the country; the civilian death toll rose 15 percent from February to March. Mosul, which was supposedly secured in 2003 by the current American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is now a safe haven for terrorists, according to an Iraqi government spokesman. The once-pacified Tal Afar, which Mr. Bush declared “a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq” in 2006, is a cauldron of bloodshed.

If Baghdad isn’t going to repeat Tal Afar’s history, we will have to send many more American troops than promised and keep them there until Mr. Maliki presides over a stable coalition government providing its own security. Hell is more likely to freeze over first. Yet if American troops don’t start to leave far sooner than that — by the beginning of next year, according to the retired general and sometime White House consultant Barry McCaffrey — the American Army will start to unravel. The National Guard, whose own new involuntary deployments to Iraq were uncovered last week by NBC News, can’t ride to the rescue indefinitely.

The center will not hold, no matter what happens in the Washington standoff over war funding. Surely no one understands better than Mr. McCain that American lives are being wasted in the war’s escalation. That is what he said on David Letterman’s show in an unguarded moment some five weeks ago — though he recanted the word wasted after taking flak the morning after.

Like his Letterman gaffe, Mr. McCain’s ludicrous market stunt was at least in the tradition of his old brand of straight talk, in that it revealed the truth, however unintentionally. But many more have watched the constantly recycled and ridiculed spectacle of his “safe” walk in Baghdad than heard him on a late-night talk show. This incident has the staying power of the Howard Dean scream. Should it speed America’s disengagement from Iraq, what looks today like John McCain’s farcical act of political suicide may some day loom large as a patriot’s final act of sacrifice for his country.

Report from Iraq

A year ago, Donald Vance learned what its like to be falsely accused by the U.S. military of aiding terrorists. He was held without charge for more than three months in a high-security prison in Iraq, and interrogated daily after sleepless nights without legal counsel or even a phone call to his family.

On Wednesday, the former private security contractor was honored for his ordeal in Washington and for speaking out against the incident. At a luncheon at the National Press Club, Vance received the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, an award named in memory of Army helicopter gunner Ron Ridenhour who struggled to bring the horrific mass murders at My Lai to the attention of Congress and the Pentagon during the Vietnam War.

Vance was joined by former president Jimmy Carter, who won a lifetime achievement award, and journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post who was recognised for his recent book, "Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone".

As hundreds at the luncheon finished their lobster salad, Vance, a two-time George W. Bush voter and Navy veteran, recounted the events of his imprisonment and the grief of his fiancé and family. They did not know if he was alive or dead, he said. They were already making inquiries to the U.S. State Department on how to ship his body home.

He then drew a wider circle around his ordeal to include the countless others who have been held falsely without charge and denied normal legal constitutional protections under law. "My name used to be 200343," Vance said recalling his prisoner ID. "If they can do this to a former Navy man and an American, what is happening to people in facilities all over the world run by the American government?"

Vance's nightmare began last year on Apr. 15 when he and co-worker Nathan Ertel barricaded themselves in a Baghdad office after their employer, an Iraqi private security firm, took away their ID tags. They feared for their lives because they suspected the company was involved in selling unauthorised guns on the black market and other nefarious activity. A U.S. military squad freed them from the red zone in Baghdad after a friend at the U.S. embassy advised him to call for help.

Once they reached the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, government officials took them inside the embassy, listened to their individual accounts and then sent them to a trailer outside for sleep. Two or three hours later, before the crack of dawn, U.S. military personnel woke them. This time, however, Vance and Ertel, Shield Security's contract manager, were under arrest. Soldiers bound their wrists with zip ties and covered their eyes with goggles blacked out with duct tape.

The two were then escorted to a humvee and driven first to possibly Camp Prosperity and then to Camp Cropper, a high-security prison near the Baghdad airport where Saddam Hussein was once kept. Vance says he was denied the usual body armour and helmet while traveling through the perilous Baghdad streets outside the safety of the Green Zone or a U.S. military installation.

It was not the way the tall 29-year-old with an easy charm and keen mind had expected to be treated. Vance claims that during the months leading up to his arrest, he worked as an unpaid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sometimes twice a day, he would share information with an agent in Chicago about the Iraqi-owned Shield Group Security, whose principals and managers appeared to be involved in weapons deals and violence against Iraqi civilians. One company employee regularly bartered alcohol with U.S. military personnel in exchange for ammunition they delivered, Vance said.

"He called it the bullets for beer programme," Vance claimed while relating the incident during an interview this week at a cigar bar just walking distance from the White House.

But his interrogators at Camp Cropper weren't impressed. Instead, his jailers insisted that Vance and Ertel had been detained and imprisoned because the two worked for Shield Group Security where large caches of weapons have been found -- weapons that may have been intended for possible distribution to insurgents and terrorist groups, Vance said.

In a lawsuit now pending against former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and "other unidentified agents," Vance and Ertel accuse their U.S. government captors of subjecting them to psychological torture day and night. Lights were kept on in their cell around the clock. They endured solitary confinement. They had only thin plastic mattresses on concrete for sleeping. Meals were of powdered milk and bread or rice and chicken, but interrupted by selective deprivation of food and water. Ceaseless heavy metal and country music screamed in their ears for hours on end, their legal complaint alleges.

They lived through "conditions of confinement and interrogation tantamount to torture", says the lawsuit filed in northern Illinois U.S. District Court. "Their interrogators utilised the types of physically and mentally coercive tactics that are supposedly reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants."

Rumsfeld is singled out as the key defendant because he played a critical role in establishing a policy of "unlawful detention and torment" that Vance, Ertel and countless others in the "war on terror" have endured, the lawsuit asserts, noting that the former defence secretary and other high-level military commanders acting at his direction developed and authorised a policy that allows government officials unilateral discretion to designate possible enemies of the United States.

Because the incident and allegations are now in litigation, the Pentagon has no comment, spokesman Army Lieut. Col. Mark Ballesteros said. He referred all inquires to the U.S. Justice Department, which also had no comment for similar reasons.

But darker allegations are included in the complaint over false imprisonment. Because he worked with the FBI, Vance contends, U.S. government officials in Iraq decided to retaliate against him and Ertel. He believes these officials conspired to jail the two not because they worked for a security company suspected of selling weapons to insurgents, but because they were sharing information with law enforcement agents outside the control of U.S. officials in Baghdad.

"In other words," claims the lawsuit, "United States officials in Iraq were concerned and wanted to find out about what intelligence agents in the United States knew about their territory and their operations. The unconstitutional policies that Rumsfeld and other unidentified agents had implemented for 'enemies' provided ample cover to detain plaintiffs and interrogate them toward that end."

It may take some time to sort out the allegations as the legal process grinds forward, but, in the meantime, Vance is raising new questions about his detention. He still wonders why his jailers didn't just call the FBI and have him cleared. They had access to his computer and cell phone to determine if his claims were true.

"When I told them to do that, they just got angry and told me to stop answering questions I wasn't being asked," Vance said. "I think they were butting heads with the State Department. I just snitched on the wrong people. I took the bull by the horns and got the horn."

And why weren't managers with the Shield Group held and interrogated?

Interrogators were certainly interested in these other individuals, according to the lawsuit. They wanted to know about the company's structure, its political contacts, and its owners -- most of whom are related to a long-established Iraqi family who fled Iraq during the years the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein, Vance said.

More startling even now is that the company has reformed. At the time they left, Shield Security held U.S.-funded contracts with the Iraqi government, Iraqi companies, NGOs and U.S. contractors. As far as Vance knows, the company still does -- but under a different name: National Shield Security.

"I built their web site," he said. "And they are still being awarded millions of dollars in contracts."

Link.

Another Triumphal Success for Our Leaders!!

Yet again, Our Leaders are so inept that they accomplish more for our enemies than they do for our nation. First, we replace Sunni-controlled Iraq with a Shiite-dominated state making Iran, a far greater threat than Saddam-led Iraq ever was, with a significant ally.

And now this! Our puppet meets with our enemies! (It's when Our Leaders' political enemies meet with our enemies that there's any problems....)

But thank God we're not led by weak wishy-washy Dems....

The Puppet Master in Action

Link.

Another Administration Appointee-Loser/Nutjob

Incompetent gets appointed U.S. Attorney, top staff quits.

And it gets better. Don't believe the "nutjob" part? Look at this:

Rachel K. Paulose’s swearing in on March 9 as the United States attorney in Minneapolis stirred debate in local legal circles because of the ceremonial trappings, including a performance by a municipal choir and a Marine Corps color guard, at the event attended by more than 300 people at the city’s University of St. Thomas law school.

Jean Pieri/St. Paul Pioneer, via Associated Press

Rachel K. Paulose has drawn criticism since her swearing-in ceremony last month as the United States attorney in Minneapolis.

But the complaints about Ms. Paulose’s investiture seem mild in comparison with the uproar ignited on Thursday, when three of her top deputies stepped down from their leadership positions. Several of their associates described the action as a protest over what the three deputies regarded as Ms. Paulose’s ideologically driven and dictatorial managerial style.

And more about this abomination is here and here. She even scared the administration that appointed here -- according to Faux Nooz!!!

Public Service Announcement

I blog (obviously), therefore I am, like, required to post this in its entirety because it proves that I am necessary.

The Liberal Media by Eric Alterman

The Politics of Pundit Prestige...

[from the April 23, 2007 issue]

Back in the pre-Internet days of yore, political punditry was the best job in journalism and one of the best anywhere. You could spout off on anything you wanted, and almost nobody would call you on it, much less find a place to publish and prove you wrong. And once you had established yourself as "credible," it required little work, save coming up with a few semi-memorable phrases. (George Will's chef-d'oeuvre was opining that the Reagan Administration "loved commerce more than it loathed Communism.") With the advent of television talk shows, riches arrived in the form of corporate speaking gigs that paid tens of thousands of dollars an hour just to say the same damn thing you said on television. When Fred Barnes famously pronounced on The McLaughlin Group, "I can speak to almost anything with a lot of authority," he was right, at least to the degree that he was really saying, "I can speak to almost anything without anyone pointing out how full of shit I usually am."

The advent of the Internet--particularly the blogosphere--has changed all that. Now, not only are the things pundits say and write preserved for posterity; there are legions of folks who track pundit pronouncements, fact-check their statements and compare them with previous utterances on the same and similar topics. They also demand a degree of transparency about methods of inquiry and the reasoning behind conclusions drawn. While proving pundits wrong--over and over and over--has not yet cost anyone a job, it has contributed to a precipitous decline in pundit prestige. The reaction to this decline varies from pundit to pundit, to be sure, but more often than not, it bespeaks a kind of panic.

America's most powerful and influential television journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, has taken a real blogosphere beating of late for his Libby trial admission that while, yes, he does consider himself to be a journalist, he does not think it proper to ask any news-related questions of top Bush Administration officials when they happen to phone him because, well, it's bad manners. (Libby was foolishly calling Russert to instruct him to shut up Chris Matthews.) His response? "Bloggers," said Russert in a recent speech, "all force candidates to accept a position, to play [an adversarial] role." This, unfortunately, in Russert's view, "puts pressure on those of us in the mainstream media [if we're not] sufficiently adversarial." Bad bloggers, bad.

Similarly, Tom Friedman's pleasant, well-remunerated life as America's most important foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann would presumably be even pleasanter were he not consistently reminded of his proclivity to pronounce "the next six months in Iraq" to be the do-or-die period for the Bush Administration. (He did so four times during a single twelve-month period, as many in the blogosphere frequently note.) You can find the term "Friedman Unit"--also known as "one Friedman" or "one F.U."--in Wikipedia, credited to Atrios, as referring to "six months in the future." More broadly, "many political observers measure any date-specific statement by a public figure regarding the future of Iraq or the Iraq War in Friedman Units, thus suggesting that the speaker's predictions of a near-term resolution of the Iraq War amount to that speaker's de facto defense of the status quo."

How does the fabulously wealthy and influential Friedman defend his faulty analyses? He doesn't. Asked about them on CNN, Friedman complained that his critics--on the left and the right--just "want to be proven right."

The "left and right" dodge is particularly popular with pundits who wish to avoid responsibility for what they say and do. You can find Howard Kurtz, frequently criticized in the blogosphere for his glaring conflicts of interest--he reports on CNN for the Washington Post and on the Washington Post for CNN and to top it all off is married to a Republican political consultant and National Review contributor--taking the same tack. Though it may "disappoint people on both the left and the right," Kurtz responds, he is not "a super-opinionated ideologue who is going to tear down news organizations because they don't see the world as I do." Similarly, in a lengthy exchange in The Politico between the writers and editors of that publication and the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America over some of the former's inarguable (and admitted) journalistic lapses, ex-Washington Post political editor John Harris noted, "When something is so freighted with either left-wing or right-wing baggage, there is a tendency in most newsrooms to simply dismiss it as so much ranting." Harris appears to believe that this is a proper response. You see, MSM reporters have no "ideology"--which was why, presumably, they were able to report so many of George W. Bush's ideologically inspired lies about Iraq and other issues without thinking to question them.

Still, the folks at The Politico look admirably open-minded and eager to engage their critics compared with the likes of, say, Time's Joe Klein. My previous criticism of Klein's work--and only his work--resulted in a hysterical hate-filled interview he offered a blogger named Rory O'Connor. More recently on my Media Matters blog, Altercation, I reprinted without comment Klein's apparently airtight December 2000 prediction that "given the circumstances, there is only one possible governing strategy [for George W. Bush]: a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship." I noted, in addition, how few of the large stable of columnists employed by Time had demonstrated the good sense to oppose George Bush's war. Klein responded with another series of schoolyard insults, terming yours truly "obsessed," "still- obsessed," "futile and pathetic," "still pathetic," "still after" him, "a suck-up," "intellectually dishonest," "not reliable" and full of "non-stop crap."

Perhaps I am. Still, the problem persists. To put it bluntly, most MSM pundits are lazy, ill informed and in thrall to the specious arguments of the powerful people they are supposed to critique. The punditocracy may not like the blogosphere's diagnosis, but there is really only one way to get it off its collective back: Work harder, do a better job. It's really that simple.

Link.

Even Republicans Hate Our Beloved Leader....QUESTION: Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months?

I suppose this makes him a uniter after all (or is he still a uniter even though he appears to be a uniter?)....

QUESTION: Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months?

ANSWER: Yes 52% No 39% Undecided 9%

No, those are not particularly shocking numbers.

We have known for a long time that Americans favor the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

What is interesting about these numbers is who they come from.

The Strategic Vision polling group asked 600 likely Iowa caucus goers the question in a survey conducted March 30-April 1, 2007.

To be more precise, the survey queried 600 likely Republican caucus goers.

Link.

Speaking of the Brilliance of Our Beloved Leader....

The Easter strip:



Link.

Incredible! The Straight Talker is Almost as Intelligent as Our Beloved Leader

Or: Hohoho! What a Kidder! Can't You Take a Joke?!

Senator John McCain has issued an apology of sorts for his remarks after visiting a Baghdad market last weekend, saying he misspoke when he declared that his ability to walk freely around the marketplace was a sign of a significant improvement in security in Iraq.

He led a Congressional delegation through the Shorja market under tight security, with 100 heavily armed American troops guarding the group and attack helicopters and snipers watching over them. Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and another member of the delegation, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, said the conditions showed that the decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional American forces to Iraq was having the intended effect.

Baghdad residents expressed astonishment at Mr. McCain’s rosy remarks, saying that he visited the marketplace, the scene of numerous deadly bombings, under unrealistic conditions. Democrats and antiwar bloggers ridiculed him for blindly supporting the administration’s so-called surge policy.

Mr. McCain, in an interview to be broadcast on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday, acknowledged that his critics were right. “Of course I am going to misspeak and I’ve done it on numerous occasions and I probably will do it in the future. I regret that when I divert attention to something I said from my message, but you know, that’s just life.”

Link. (Link to photo.)

Josh notes the follow-up; retaliation for being an American schmuck's photo-op:

Earlier today I posted this clip from the Times of London that reported that "21 Shia market workers [from the market John McCain visited the day before] were ambushed, bound and shot dead."

Now, we know that people get killed in Iraq every day. And there are inter-sectarian murders for various retaliatory, symbolic or terroristic reasons. But 21 workers from this same market attacked, bound and shot in what sound like execution style killings? Right after McCain was there the day before in a walkaround to demonstrate the success of the surge?

This hadn't occurred to me until I saw this email from TPM Reader KT who wrote. "Do we know whether the ambushed market workers were the ones who had done business with McCain's group, and therefore with the US military? I really hope not."

I don't know if claims of collaboration would have to be the issue. It could be as simple as sending a counter-message.

Before going any further, let me say clearly that I don't know anything about this particular market. How big it is. Whether things like this happen there routinely or whether this incident stands out in a particular way. More local knowledge could quickly show these two events are totally unrelated. But if the Times report is accurate, I think this bears more scrutiny.

Link.

Straight Talk for the Day

From "60 Minutes" via Talking Points Memo comes John McCain in an illustration of what Straight Talk is and isn't.

McCain acknowledges in a "60 Minutes" interview that his support for the "surge" in Iraq means that "I disagree with what the majority of the American people want." He also says that he regrets making what turned out to be entirely delusional comments about public safety in Baghdad.

But in McCain's telling, it's all just part of the fun of who he is and what he does. "Of course I am going to misspeak, and I've done it on numerous occasions and I probably will do it in the future," the Arizona senator says in the interview. "I regret that when I divert attention to something I said from my message, but you know, that's just life. I'm happy, frankly, with the way I operate, otherwise it would be a lot less fun."

Link.

Another Winner. Or Flip-Flopping Pandering Hypocrite

Guess we have to start dissing Mitt, just in case.... Then again, maybe he'll be this cycle's John Connally....

To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck.
"I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.
Yet the former Massachusetts governor's hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia.
Last year's trip was an outing with major donors to the Republican Governors Association, which Romney headed at the time.
An aide said Wednesday that Romney was not trying to mislead anyone, although he confirmed Romney had been hunting only on those occasions in his life.

Link.