Windmill Tilter

Just in case some aren't familiar with what a Mayberry Machiavelli is, please read this from Ron Suskind on Bush's first director of faith-based something-or-other, John DiIulio. Or you can just read the following:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Why did I pick that name, beyond the fact that it sounds cool? Because the common theme with any Machiavelli-ish type instict is paranoia. Right-wingers are paranoid, but in a fascistic way, how else could you explain some of the nutty things they believe? And yes, I am paranoid of the right wing, a tad paranoid, if you will, because I was once under its spell.

Why can't we start calling its brand of "Fair and Balanced", uncritical, "the right says this and left says this" reporting what it is, namely, affirmative action for conservative hacks and people of middling intelligence? Fox's habit of allowing its talking heads to get away with labelling everything an "interpretation", regardless of its resemblance to the truth, is just them trying to find space in the discourse for people who just aren't up to recognizing facts. Points of view are given weight and time not for their correctness, but merely because a certain number of people believe them. Affirmative action. You know this would REALLY piss them off.

A judge with balls has started the ball rolling:

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration Monday to either charge terrorism suspect Jose Padilla with a crime or release him after more than 2 1/2 years in custody.

The administration has 45 days to do so. When (and what reason do we have to believe that he would actually follow the order?) he doesn't, can this finally be something all reasonable people will agree on as a high crime or misdemeanor? It's too bad all the appeals will delay Bush's downfall. I admit it, I'm a little delusional.

Fox is still standing by its political decision to call suicide bombers, homicide bombers, and has gone so far as to alter AP stories and actual quotes, but in a promo last week for John Kasich's February 26th show examining the motives and roots of suicide bombers, the voiceover actually called them suicide bombers, as did the description on the web site, which I have saved for prosperity:

We’ll also take you inside the disturbed minds of suicide bombers as we talk with the authors of “The Road to Martyr Square,” Ann Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg. (emphasis added)

Is it possible that Fox recognizes the factual insufficiency of calling these killers homicide bombers?

I'm not sure why this wouldn't be seen as a positive lesson for our armed forces. As this becomes more common, the old justifications of military bigotry will look even more ridiculous. Why shouldn't the leadership take some responsibility for making gay soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines more comfortable, rather than placing the responsibility on gays to make the homophobes they serve with more comfortable, thereby enabling increased hatred toward gays?

Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun actively encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do. The navy announced Monday that it had asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gay men and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers.

People who share my birthday: Colin Firth - my girlfriend would trade me in for him in a heartbeat; Ryan Phillippe - pretty boy; Randy Johnson - evil Yankee; Roger Maris - less evil Yankee; Arnold Palmer - somewhat goofy golfer; Amy Irving - actor, I guess; Joe Perry - Aerosmith guitarist; Jose Feliciano - some singer I've heard of. The lesson here is the only cool person who shares my birthday is Joe Perry.

I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. I tend to watch Fox News quite often, probably more than CNN or MSNBC, because I have a masochistic streak within me. I'm used to the evil. However, I was not prepared for what I saw tonight. I guess Fox's obsession with propping up all thing conservative and tearing down the mainstream media in the present day wasn't enough because the fools are now going back in time to do the same with the Nixon administration and the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate. The panel of frauds, in laughing unison, attacked Woodward and Bernstein in a discussion of Deep Throat, and accused them of making up Deep Throat, and claimed that he wasn't one person, but a composite of sources. I've heard this theory, as have you I'm sure, but these people didn't cite any evidence to prove their point. Why attack the credibility of W & B on a hunch? Because Fox, in its never-ending crusade to label all non-Fox media as "liberal", is now being retroactively "Fair and Balanced" (don't sue me Roger Ailes). To quote the Sports Guy, "I just threw up in my mouth."

I love this. I'm totally that guy telling his wife, "It's ok, the Sox won the whole thing!" Tears are coming to my eyes.

Better than the real thing. A little racy though.

Ann Coulter is the single biggest reason why this kind of hate speech is now more mainstream. She gets exposure and encouragement on Hannity, O'Reilly, and other cable shows, most often hosted by men, and is able to say things that no man would be allowed to say on these shows and elsewhere. It's pretty clear that these pious moralizers just have raging hard-ons for her. I can't imagine anyone gets more complaints than her, and it only seems to encourage them to book her more often.

Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism, I say let’s give them some. They’ve have intellectual terror on campus for years....it’s time for a new McCarthyism.

(Via Oliver Willis)

A deeper take on why Media Matters' crusade against Sinclair is vital:

Funny thing. I'm sometimes accused of blurring the lines between mainstream conservatives and extremists. But that's exactly what Hyman does. Either he's a blunderer of the first order, or he's an extremist mole. So, just so there's no confusion: Christian Identity has nothing to do with mainstream Christianity. It is an extremist racial belief system that adopts the guise of Christianity but has practices and beliefs that are not part of any traditional mainstream church. Most of their beliefs, in fact, constitute heresies for many faiths.I'm hoping this was just a really dumb mistake. Because if it wasn't, and Hyman wanted us to think that Identity was just another kind of Christianity, well ... that's a problem.

He makes a great point, but the landscape has been so skewed by years of conservative media insidiousness, I fear we have no choice but play down to their level:

Democrats have been losing because we're unable to stick a scandal, but we've also been failing because we've lost sight of our strengths. Somewhere along the way, we looked at the Lewinsky scandal, thought "we should do that", and never looked back save to criticize those who weren't keeping up.

One more thing, he says:

We're not going to win by copying the Republican playbook. In football, you spend the week before a game learning the other team's plays. But you don't run them. You learn how to defend against them, and you run the plays you're good at.

But the almighty New England Patriots don't do only that. Sir Bill Belichick has made a legacy of changing what they're good at from game to game based on opponents' weaknesses. At this time, the right is very weak and exposable on the issue of values and hypocricy because they've been so cavalier about not hiding it, as they are shameless egomonkeys.

(Via Yglesias)

Unlike the right-wing's alleged media watchdog sites, Media Matters for America extensively quotes its subjects and often provides links to video, audio and transcripts to insure against allegations of taking things out of context. Alas, media wingers still claim that. Why? They suck, that's why. I can't think of a better reason. This entry is quintisential Media Matters. What it does is so straight-forward, merely comparing the right's allegations to the public record, which requires thorough investigation and an honest look at issues. That's why the wingers hate it, and by comparison, the Media Research Center looks absolutely juvenile. I think now that McCain is dead, there's room for a new political god in my life, and David Brock is that person. Dick Durbin is screaming up the charts, though. I've got competing crushes on Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer, also. Jesus, there are some good senators out there.

On AmericaBlog:

Well newsflash Washington. The GOP is the one that rose gay-bashing and gay-baiting and sex-baiting to an art, and JeffJimGuckertGannon willingly joined the family values parade in print and in passion. They're trying to ban condoms, pornography, AIDS education. They take children away from gays, and want to make our very lives a crime. GOP Senators compare us to kleptomaniacs, alcoholics, and man-dog sex. And they can't even handle a bronze breast on a statue.

We'd be knee deep in an impeachment, conviction and lynching if Bush were a Democrat. I feel the need to call them assholes for this, even if it's only a hypothetical.

I happen to work in law enforcement, so I'm not regularly surrounded by very politically progressive people. Talking about torture as a state policy with them is just maddening. It's one thing to have an intellectual position on the benefits of torture, e.g. Alan Dershowitz, (although from what I've read, the benefits are VASTLY outweighed by the negatives, and likely only hypothetical). But if you think it's ok because because you heard Limbaugh or Hannity or (even worse) Savage say it, without trying to learn about it, well, how aren't you a bad person? Am I supposed to overlook the evil in this position because this person is a good family man, or friendly to me at work? As Chris Rock said, what do you want? A cookie? You're supposed to be a good family man and be friendly to people, so no, someone who chooses to think torturing sentient beings is a good thing to do, without really thinking about it or its implications is a less good person than one who is disgusted by torture. That way of thinking SHOULD make a progressive person recoil in disgust.

This guy was apparently moved by John McCain once, when he was still alive, God rest his soul. The fact that the new McCain can vote yea on Gonzalez for Attorney General is simply beyond my brain's comprehension. "Hey, I was tortured mercilously for years and I watched my best friends suffer at the hands of torturers, but you know, now I don't feel it's really that terrible a thing to do," says TAFKA-McCain. Although I'm being glib here, I was actually crushed when I learned that. He was (again, God rest his soul, go to the light Johnny) my first and only real political hero. I shook his hand at a campaign rally on Wall Street (while cutting out of my law school internship for a nice 3 hour 'lunch'), and it is one of the most memorable moments of my life. I still have the McCain2000 pin I got that day, and I remember saying "Big fan!" to him, like he was Pedro Martinez or something. Yeah, I felt like a jackass. I guess McCain's public persona meant so much to me back then because I wanted to be a Republican, but my heart was inevitably pulling me to the blue side. Since then, I've realized I'm a good old-fashioned centrist-liberal-Democrat, but back then McCain was right at the crossroads with me (or at least I thought he was, yes he was!, this is a different McCain). The fact that he can now whore for this monstrous administration position on Social Security is just icing. I'm sure he's looking down right now, saying "Who the hell is this clown in my body?!"

"Middle-Eastern hilarity."

Apparently, this fella had access before Talon even existed. Seriously, who was he, um, servicing?

This "Gannon" scandal seems just a little too easy. By that I mean, does it sound crazy that this obviously confused and devious man was merely a patsy? Here's one scenario. The guys in the smoke-filled rooms who are cozy with the White House, if not IN the White House, fenagled to get him day passes to the briefing room, but denied him a permanent pass, which most of the other reporters have (plausible deniability, and/or can probably be blamed on some low-level staffer or, if they're ready for him to go, Scott McLellan, the press secretary). Make sure the patsy is someone desperate to belong, like one of the many self-hating closet cases that infest the right's media and policy machine (e.g. David Brock in his former life). Then send the message to the right wing bloggers/media to distance the "centrist" conservatives from the issue, and conveniently paint progressives as anti-gay (this hasn't started in force yet, probably because they're too busy fitting over Eason Jordan and Ward Churchill). All to make it appear that "Gannon" was just some nut (and use the machine to keep repeating this so that the connections the progressives make between GOPUSA/Talon and the White House will be ignored by a complacent nation of Fox watchers). The ultimate goal? Taking the alleged MSM's focus off of what ever issue it on the table when the scandal hits (I have a feeling they just got ridiculously lucky that it happened during the Social Security debate, although I'm sure their aim was to hide the awful war effort, but looks like they got their cake and are stuffing their faces with it). My lord.

I suppose they aren't all frauds. But isn't it just as likely that, rather than having some strange ability to see things from another world, they just are so perceptive and have such good deductive abilities they they have convinced themselves that they can see dead people?

What if the Clinton administration had been accused of planting one of Ted Turner's minions as a fake reporter during press briefings and news conferences? This seems like a pretty exhaustive list of the different ways Clinton would have been bent over. But for george w. bush? We'll see. Check out the rest of the blog for the best coverage of this issue.

Now the whackos are falsely accusing the left of being anti-gay over their exposure of the fact that "Jeff Gannon" may be gay (or even involved in prostitution), just as they called them racists for opposing Rice for Secretary of State and Gonzalez for AG. Of course, they realize the real point of exposing his homosexuality, they just choose to be dishonest. Let me just try to articulate for my own good why hypocricy matters, and conservatives lie like crazy to justify their hypocricies. Progressives realize that people are imperfect and, more importantly, it is impossible to expect perfection from anyone. Conservatives tend to hold out the "ideal" as what we need to strive for. Too often their ideal is impossible, or not even preferable. Hypocricy doesn't matter as much to Progressives because we know this already, and our policies and words match that. That is why we believe in a broad safety net and inclusive racial, sexual and gender policies. An understanding that hypocricy/imperfection/diversity is inherent in human nature is the bedrock of being a caring person. I think I speak for all Progressives when I say, "I don't care if 'Jeff Gannon' is gay, and I'll stop making an issue of conservative hypocricy when they stop demonizing the behavior that so many of them are routinely cought doing." They will be justified in saying that they don't care that "Gannon" is gay and that the only people who are making an issue of it are the Lefties, if the Lefties are still making an issue out of this when conservatives support policies that don't discriminate against gay people, and "Gannon" repudiates his anti-gay words. Won't happen.

For any Yankee fans who might be reading (Adam). 

From Charlie Pierce, via Eric Alterman:

You do not own their courage. The people who stood in line Sunday did not stand in line to make Americans feel good about themselves. You do not own their courage. They did not stand in line to justify lies about Saddam and al-Qaeda, so you don't own their courage, Stephen Hayes. They did not stand in line to justify lies about weapons of mass destruction, or to justify the artful dodginess of Ahmad Chalabi, so you don't own their courage, Judith Miller. They did not stand in line to provide pretty pictures for vapid suits to fawn over, so you don't own their courage, Howard Fineman, and neither do you, Chris Matthews. You do not own their courage. They did not stand in line in order to justify the dereliction of a kept press. They did not stand in line to make right the wrongs born out of laziness, cowardice, and the easy acceptance of casual lying. They did not stand in line for anyone's grand designs. They did not stand in line to play pawns in anyone's great game, so you don't own their courage, you guys in the PNAC gallery. You do not own their courage. They did not stand in line to provide American dilettantes with easy rhetorical weapons, so you don't own their courage, Glenn Reynolds, with your cornpone McCarran act out of the bowels of a great university that deserves a helluva lot better than your sorry hide. They did not stand in line to be the instruments of tawdry vilification and triumphal hooting from bloghound commandos. They did not stand in line to become useful cudgels for cheap American political thuggery, so you don't own their courage, Freeper Nation. You do not own their courage. They did not stand in line to justify a thousand mistakes that have led to more than a thousand American bodies. They did not stand in line for the purpose of being a national hypnotic for a nation not even their own. They did not stand in line for being the last casus belli standing. They did not stand in line on behalf of people's book deals, TV spots, honorarium checks, or tinpot celebrity. They did not stand in line to be anyone's talking points. You do not own their courage. We all should remember that.

The MSM has picked up on what has been known to those who care for a while now, that the Bush administration essentially has a paid partisan asking questions during press conferences.

Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."

How do media conservatives' gums not bleed when they claim to be unbiased?

With apologies to Atrios, but it's really just a good idea.

Meese? Not really, but made you think a little. I'm not sure why I'm choosing to post this, and I'm not revelling in the moose's pain (though he probably felt little), but didn't you think the first picture was the moose caught in the windshield? Nope, he was just a big, furry can opener.