Matt Taibbi on Journalism's Endangered Species

Matt Taibbi has picked up the torch of journalism so predictably dropped by Politico.

First of all, I want to congratulate Michael Hastings for the amazing job he did on the McChrystal piece. Not only was it a coup for our magazine, but it's a reminder of what journalists are supposed to be doing. For quite a long time political journalism, particularly in Washington, has been reduced to an access-trading game, where reporters are rewarded for favorable coverage of those in the know with more time and availability.

This symbiotic dynamic affects not just individual reporters but whole publications and news channels; it's a huge reason why reporters have in general resisted challenging political authorities. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets not only himself but his whole paper shut out of the access game. Since many recent politicians have made good on this implied threat (George Bush's shut-out of the Washington Post's White House reporters is a classic example), what we get is coverage that across the board fails to ask hard questions and in general treats leaders with a reverence they don't always deserve.

But his bête noire David Brooks reflexively bristles at the notion that reporters and sources shouldn't be chums.

In the column Brooks talks about how the media landscape has changed over the past 50 years, about the gotcha journalism culture in which a public official, sadly, no longer feels safe in having a beer with a reporter and bragging about his mistresses and his Swiss bank accounts. Once upon a time, Brooks says, pols and reporters did a lot of "kvetching" together, gossiping about events in and around the Hill – and most of that "kvetching" stayed out of print:

Those of us in the press corps have to figure out how to treat this torrent of private kvetching. During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

Ah, the halcyon days when reporters could be trusted to protect the elite...

But, as Taibbi also notes, CBS news's Afghanistan "reporter" Lara Logan may be even more callow than Brooks.

Lara Logan, come on down! You're the next guest on Hysterical Backstabbing Jealous Hackfest 2010!

I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Politico Almost Commits an Act of Journalism

The unvarnished look at General McChrystal that just tanked his career was made available by a freelance reporter who wasn't beholden to almighty "access." So said Politico before they sent that little revelation down the memory hole.

The Politico was so hopped up about the story that it took the extraordinary step of posting on its site a PDF of Rolling Stone’s article because Rolling Stone had not put it online fast enough. In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks. [emphasis mine]

. . .

Our reveal is looking pretty good, isn’t it? Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee let us in on a little trade secret. They have no motive to make it up. Lee is a beat reporter herself, qualified to speak on the subject. Lubold has covered the military for years. Politico trades in this kind of observation; it was founded to reveal some of journalism’s “state secrets.” Tom Ricks, a former beat reporter for the Washington Post who also covered the military, says pretty much the same thing: beat reporters have an investment in continuing the relationship so they are less risky for a powerful figure like McChrystal.

And then, the next day… the reveal disappears. The Politico erased it, as if the thing had never happened. Down the memory hole, like in Orwell’s 1984. The story as you encounter it online today doesn’t have that part (“would not risk burning bridges…”) in it. Clint Hendler of Columbia Journalism Review, who discovered the missing lines, asked The Politico about it…

Hendler got no answer. One wonders what access Politico is trying to preserve.

Irony, Thy Name is National Enquirer

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.




I've always had a healthy disrespect for tabloids. In fact, throughout my college years, when I was ensconced in my studies of media and journalism, I considered the term "tabloid journalism" an oxymoron. Boy, is my face red. But, not so red as is the Gray Lady's, I should think. She's now playing catch up on news her editors did not think "fit to print."

Scandal has turned Mr. Edwards into a pathetic has-been. It's had much the same effect on the news bosses at the mainstream media, who used to be the gatekeepers for all things fit to print. When the Enquirer broke the story months ago – while Mr. Edwards was still in the race – they treated it like poison ivy. “Classically not a Times-like story,” sniffed Craig Whitney, the standards editor of The New York Times. This was the same paper, you may recall, that recently ran an innuendo-laden story on John McCain and his friendship with an attractive lobbyist a decade or so ago. No wonder critics accuse the MSM of double standards – one for Democrats, and another for Republicans.

Indeed, the Enquirer turned up its nose at McCain non-story. It would seem, wisely so. This and other revelations from The New Republic -- they, of the Stephen Glass debacle. That The National Enquirer is burying the bona fide press corps in the sack, is shaping up to be the story of the year.

Normally, in the pitched tabloid battle for exclusives, losing a competitive bombshell like the McCain scandal would send Perel into fits. Not this time. Five Enquirer reporters had spent more than a month in 2007 chasing down the same rumors but failed to uncover any documentary evidence. "I wouldn't have run that piece, there was nothing in it," Perel told me recently about the Times story, which received widespread criticism when it ran. "It was filled with innuendo. . . . When you're done reading it, you're like, there's no there there."

My first intimation that the Enquirer might just be a force to be reckoned with came while I was watching a documentary on the O.J. Simpson trial. (No. It did not come during the actual trial; a story which became so burdensome, day after day, that I extended great effort to tune it out.) But, I was somewhat taken aback to hear more legitimate reporters speak in respectful terms about the quality reporting the Enquirer did on O.J. While other reporters were beating minutiae to death, the Enquirer was willing to get dirty, and in doing so, kept breaking the big stories. They became the go to source during that scandal.

In fact, the barbarians have been at the gates ever since the O. J. Simpson trial, which turned out to be a cultural and racial event of immense significance. The MSM couldn't bear to dumpster-dive into the lurid details, even as an insatiable public gobbled them up. That was when they began to lose their grip on deciding what is news. With the explosion of the blogosphere, their power is gone for good.

It seems that while many of the major media brokers are busy chasing headlines, Enquirer reporters are chasing actual stories. I speak not of the kinds of stories they do, but of the way they do their reporting. Like it or not they are doing actual investigative journalism -- something the TNR piece makes clear -- while far too many so-called reporters are writing stories from press releases and proving to be knee-pad wearing whores for the same unreliable sources, again and again.




New York Times "Reporter" Judith Miller
photo: Kevin Wolf AP


Nowhere has the whoredom of mainstream press been more evident than with the media circus over VP selection. Massive resources have been allocated for reporters to camp out on lawns and whip themselves, and, sadly, the public, into a frenzy over something that we were all going to find out anyway. Why is it so important to get a story first, when no one, but no one, will give a shit two weeks from now who "broke" the "Biden is the VP pick" story? The only thing mildly interesting in this woeful display has been watching some bloggers and reporters step on their cranks, in their haste to "get it first."

What is more important? Getting it first, or getting it right?

Perhaps the paper of record will be able to reestablish its cred with the newest investigation into John Edwards's smarminess. This they will do by retracing some of the source material for their successful reportage into Eliot Spitzer's smarminess. I hope it pans out for their sake, if not for Elizabeth Edwards's.

Press Gives Head -- Curmudgette Has Head Cold

The latter is really apropos of nothing. But I appear to have a fife and drum corps living in my sinuses and I feel like complaining.

Remember Media Whores Online? Gone but not forgotten, it still ranks as one of my favorite political sites of all time. I think Katrina VandenHeuvel was giving them a little high five on the "Colbert Report," when she said, and I quote, "We [The Nation] never lost our head, while too much of the media gave head."



For a view from within the red light district, read Gary Kamiya's "Iraq: Why the media failed" in Salon. Writes Kamiya:

It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- they're too well known to repeat. In any case, the real failing was not in any one area; it was across the board. Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. And it wasn't just a failure of analysis. With some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned reporting was also absent.

Like most of the apologia to issue from members of the fourth estate, it puts a lot of the blame for the media's credulity and lack of vigilance on 9/11. In short, it does not wholly satisfy. Worthwhile reading, none the less.

I wish I could get homemade chicken soup delivered.

I Repeat: Lame President

On Scarborough Country, of all damned shows, a discussion of how Bush is polling worse than Satan. I can't embed YouTube vids on blogger, but here's a link. Worthwhile viewing and very interesting to see Richard Wolffe on the panel. Wolffe of the aforementioned Newsweek article attributing Bush's rude rebuff in a midwest diner to his lame duck status. It just kills me that in a nation that finds Bush worse than Osama bin Laden -- and SATAN -- journalists like Wolffe still coddle the man.

Lame Duck? Try, Lame President.

Rose: It's time...to take a big trip across
the George Washington Bridge.

Celeste: No.

Rose: It's a good idea.

Celeste: It's a crutch. It's a crutch!

Rose: We'll do it this one last time, okay?

Celeste: All right, this once.

Rose: I'm ready. Are you?

Celeste: Yes.

Rose: Oh! Oh, look! Look, look!
Aren't you on that TV show? Oh, look!...

Who could forget that classic scene in "Soapdish" when Whoopi Goldberg escorts Sally Field to the mall for a little ego infusion. Imagine what would have happened if poor Celeste of "The Sun Also Sets" had made her way to the Paramus Park Mall only to be dissed by her core demographic. Well that's what happened to our President on a trip to the heartland.

On Tuesday, President Bush popped in for a surprise visit to the Sterling Family Restaurant, a homey diner in Peoria, Ill. It’s a scene that has been played out many times before by this White House and others: a president mingling among regular Americans, who, no matter what they might think of his policies, are usually humbled and shocked to see the leader of the free world standing 10 feet in front of them.

But on Tuesday, the surprise was on Bush. In town to deliver remarks on the economy, the president walked into the diner, where he was greeted with what can only be described as a sedate reception. No one rushed to shake his hand. There were no audible gasps or yelps of excitement that usually accompany visits like this. Last summer, a woman nearly fainted when Bush made an unscheduled visit for some donut holes at the legendary Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant in Chicago. In Peoria this week, many patrons found their pancakes more interesting. Except for the click of news cameras and the clang of a dish from the kitchen, the quiet was deafening.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Bush said to a group of women, who were sitting in a booth with their young kids. “How’s the service?” As Bush signed a few autographs and shook hands, a man sitting at the counter lit a cigarette and asked for more coffee. Another woman, eyeing Bush and his entourage, sighed heavily and went back to her paper. She was reading the obituaries. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” a White House aide told her. “No problem,” she huffed, in a not-so-friendly way. “Life goes on, I guess.”

Newsweek is giving this humiliation the gentlest of spin, chalking up the chilly reception to his lame duck status. Even now the mass media coddle this President and refuse to address the obvious. This is not a President with low poll numbers in a difficult war. This is a failed President, who has brought this nation to the precipice with one disastrous decision after another. The American people know it. They know it in Peoria and they know it from one corner of the country to the other. No one but the most die-hard members of Republican base and the money changers on Wall Street, as Newsweek takes pains to point out, can still exhibit enthusiasm for this President.

The mass media still try to portray this Presidency in the context of history and politics as usual. But we left normal long ago. That a sitting President would be dismissed and pointedly ignored in a midwestern diner is positively surreal. He is a hated man who has so disgraced the office of President that people can't even bring themselves to show respect the title in spite of the man. There is really nowhere to go but to impeachment.

Fox's War on News

Fox Broadcasting's "war on news" continues with sniper fire aimed at CNN's Anderson Cooper. One of their talking hairdos describes the newsman as a "fabricated" person like Paris Hilton. Apparently heightening Cooper's humiliation is that he losing the ratings war to a woman -- Greta Van Sustern. Well ratings are everything, after all, when your stock in trade is demagoguery.

Today I Weep for Journalism

Last night I watched "Scarborough Country." I don't expect anything like unbiased reporting from the former Congressman turned "news man." Sad enough that he is featured prominently on a "news" network. Sadder still to hear him lament the sad demise of esteemed broadcast journalist Barbara Walters's reputation. Saddest of all to acknowledge that he is right.

SCARBOROUGH: Matthew, explain to people, if you will, that only know her through “The View” and through those interviews that she does on ABC—I guess “20/20” she‘s been doing for years—explain to people what a trailblazer Barbara Walters was and how hard she worked for her reputation, that Rosie O‘Donnell tatters every time she does something like this.

FELLING: Absolutely. It has been a shock to me that she‘s been putting up with this for this long. She is the patron saint. She is the woman that all female journalists since the ‘70s looked up to and said, “You know what? She can do it; I‘m going to do, too.”

She was perfection. She was the gold standard with regards to female journalists through the ‘80s, into the ‘90s. And now she‘s doing this Faustian bargain, where she‘s willing to put up with it, but only so far. And I do really think that Rosie‘s days are numbered.

I hate "The View." I've never understood what the seasoned news woman thought she was doing when she launched this show. For the trail-blazer who broke through the glass ceiling and proved that a woman could deliver news with the same sense of gravitas and dignity of her male counterparts, to be associated with a format that sounds more like a coffee-clatch than a news show, has always struck me as the ultimate come-down. "The View" seems almost designed to prove that women are biologically determined to be gossipy, shallow, and unserious. And now the show has reached a new low. Rosie O'Donnell's public feud with Donald Trump is playing out with all the dignity of professional wrestling.

Sadly this makes Rosie only slightly more ridiculous than the crop of talking heads scattered across the cable dial. Anchors no longer deliver news. They bloviate. From Bill O'Reilly's projection about everyone else's bias, to Tim Russert's pandering/badgering intensity, to Chris Matthews bullying and obsequious "I agree with you" brown-nosing. And while the left has its intellectually satisfying Keith Olbermann diatribes, one could hardly confuse his pontificating with objectivity. Wisdom and surprising literacy, but not objectivity.

The whole of broadcast news, which once held promise as a medium for disseminating information, has devolved into self-parody. It's a cheap carney side show which I half expect to start featuring geeks biting the heads off live chickens.

Fox News has gone through the looking glass with grammatically challenged spokesmodels, spouting McCarthyesque agitprop:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: You talk about the hostile enemy, obviously being Iraq, but hostile enemies right here on the home front. Yesterday Senator Ted Kennedy, proposing that any kind of a troop surge should mean there should be congressional approval of that. A lot of democrats not coming to his side on this. But obviously this is not going to be an easy sell on Capitol Hill, even if it’s not an easy sell to the American Public.

But tragically the rest of the industry has followed it through to the Red Queen's court.

None of this is news to blogosphere, I'm sure; which functions as one of the few watchdog venues for an industry which seems to have no adequate check or balance. But lately I find myself thinking back to the early days when a much missed Media Whores Online began its crusade to remind the Fourth Estate of its proud heritage. Watching Scarborough last night I came to the sad realization that the wreckage of Benjamin Franklin's legacy has declined still further and shows little hope of regaining the high ground.

Americans across the political spectrum confuse what can only be described as self-righteous indignation with refreshing honesty. Who wants the dry, impartial reporting of a Walter Cronkite or a young Barbara Walters, when they can get their factoids from carnival barkers and blond chippies in push-up bras? I'm left waxing nostalgic for a time when the empty-headed Bill Boggs and the crass Morton Downey Jr. represented the lunatic fringe of a profession yearning to be taken seriously. Today their antics seem tame by comparison.

What accounts for broadcast journalism doesn't belong on a "news" channel. It should be fought out in the Roman Coliseum, awaiting the thumbs up or thumbs down from Emperor Bush. Entertainment for the hoi poloi to distract them from our crumbling empire.

Slow News Day

Oh my God! I agree with Tony Snow. Saying that out loud makes me want to wash my mouth out with soap. But when he quipped that the DC press whores must be having a "slow news day," for all their fascination with Laura Bush's skin cancer lesion, I have to agree. Isn't there anything else going on in the world? Here's a little of the exchange, as reported in the New York Times Blog:

Q: Tony, can you tell us about Mrs. Bush’s skin cancer? How is she doing? And how was the decision reached not to disclose this publicly until questions were asked?

Mr. Snow: Yes, I talked to her a couple of minutes ago. She’s doing fine. And she said, “It’s no big deal, and we knew it was no big deal at the time.” Frankly I don’t think anybody thought it was the sort of thing that occasioned a need for a public disclosure. Furthermore, she’s got the same right to medical privacy that you do. She’s a private citizen; she’s not an elected official. So for that reason she didn’t disclose it. But she’s doing fine, and thank you for your concern.

Pressed as to whether Mrs. Bush would begin advocating for screening for skin cancers, Mr. Snow said:

“She’s also had colds, she’s had the flu, she’s had stomach aches –”

Q: But she could still — it could be a platform.

Mr. Snow: You guys are really stretching it. I mean, it is now officially a really slow news day.

Laura Bush's health concerns, either serious, or, as in this case, un-serious, are not my business. I don't want to know. I'm simply not afflicted with such voyeuristic tendencies.

One of my old college roommates used to quip that, "Every time the cat farts in the White House, it's 'news'." This fascination with the daily comings and goings in the halls of power comes at the expense of coverage of things the public actually does need to know. There are two overlapping and interrelated problems that have led to the perception of the nation's capital as the navel of the world. One is the very structure of news gathering. Gaye Tuchman used the term "news net" in her book "Making News: The Construction of Reality." She explains that news gathering relies heavily on a system of beats and bureaus. You can only catch fish where you throw your net, and the nets are thrown at public institutions which are deemed newsworthy and credible. If a public figure says it, it's a "fact" by virtue of conferred status. If a public figure does it, it's news, even if it's painfully boring and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.

The second half of the problem is the disappearance of those very beats and bureaus from all over the country. Thanks to the consolidation of mass media, local newspapers from across the nation have slipped quietly down the memory hole. Many have been bought out by competing papers and shut down. Others have been replaced by conglomerates which package tasty, little McNews bites and publish them under the mastheads of small "local" papers. The "Media Monopoly" as Ben Bagdikian calls it, now consists of 5 corporations which own the vast majority of newspapers, television outlets, radio, book publishing, and film. Five corporations own the entire info-tainment business. And their focus on the bottom-line has meant, among other things, that the beats covered by reporters have dwindled to a few major focal points. The result is a well-fed beltway press corps and metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing across the rest of the newsworthy world.

There is still another problem, exemplified by this type of reportage that I'm at pains to explain. That of the DC press corps itself, which elevates the trivial and minimizes the deadly serious, even in its given purview. Where was this aggressive questioning during the build-up to the Iraq war? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have driven a truck the gaps in logic provided by DC officials, in their ever-shifting rationales for bombing the hell out of a crippled nation. Where was it when a male prostitute was sitting among them, gaining unprecedented access to the aforementioned halls of power? Where was it when it fell to David Corn at the ever-vigilant Nation to point out that Bob Novack had no business knowing that Valarie Plame Wilson was in the CIA? Why does the press corps have to be clubbed over the head by the blogosphere to notice crimes and misdemeanors in their midst, but positively obsess over an in-office procedure, performed under local anesthetic. It would be funny if the net result for the public at large weren't so serious.

Editors Note: Both Ben Bagdikian's "New Media Monopoly" and Gaye Tuchman's "Making News" are available in Curmudgette's Reading Room, although the latter is currently out of print and available only from resellers. Still, highly recommended.

Judith Miller Worries About Blogger Integrity

Judith Miller has stopped drinking the Neocon Kool-Aid and is now clear headed enough to worry about the damage bloggers can do.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

Gosh. I don't know if we can parrot the talking points of shady political insiders and land the nation in an illegal war, but then we don't have the New York Times as a platform for our unverified rumors do we?

I think it's a little late in the game for the credulous Miss Miller to talk about journalistic vigilance.

Can We Call It Civil War Now?

Newsweek's Rod Nordland gave a very illuminating interview in Foreign Policy last week. In it he describes the way the press is being "managed" in Iraq and discloses that conditions there are far worse than Americans know. It makes for very worthwhile reading and lends some insight into the way our "free press" is curtailed. But this statement gave me pause.

Living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war.

Note to Mr. Nordland: You're still spinning for the White House. Iraq is not on the verge of civil war. It is in a civil war. John Murtha had it right when he wrote this in The Huffington Post.

According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, the definition of a civil war is a "war between political factions or regions within the same country." That is exactly what is going on in Iraq, not a global war on terrorism, as the President continues to portray it.

The spin that the country is constantly "on the verge" of a civil war is becoming increasingly dissonant against the backdrop of events like this.

Gunmen roaming a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday killed at least 42 unarmed Iraqis as soon as they identified them as Sunnis, emergency police said.

Ala'a Makki, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party -- Iraq's main Sunni political movement -- said the victims included women and children.

He called the killings in Hay al Jihad "one of the biggest massacres of Sunnis."

Later Sunday, two car bombs detonated simultaneously at a market in Baghdad's Karsa neighborhood, killing at least 19 and wounding 59, police said.

The market is close to the Tammimi Hussainiye, a Shiite prayer site.

In the Hay al Jihad rampage, gunmen -- mostly "young reckless teenagers" -- started to pick up Sunni youth and execute them in public, while others went door-to-door looking for Sunni families who stayed behind, Makki said.

After warning one Iraqi woman she had 10 seconds to leave, the gunmen killed her and her children, Makki said.

A member of the Iraqi Islamic Party was dragged out of his house at 7 a.m. and executed, he said.

A witness in the Hay al Jihad neighborhood said he walked outside his home and saw the main street lined with bodies, and the attackers setting fire to homes.

He said residents tried to call the Ministries of Interior and Defense, without success.

Makki blamed the Mehdi militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The violence continued for eight hours, Makki said, blaming the Ministries of Interior and Defense for not responding, and saying U.S. forces responded too late to stop most of the killings.

Yes, this is the kind of thing our troops are called upon to do now. As Murtha says:

We’re spending all this money and diverting our resources away from the war on terrorism because we’re involved in a civil war in Iraq.

But true to form, The New York Times reports:

In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

How much more does it have to expand -- and I have little doubt that it will get much worse -- before we can call this what it is?

Fineman and the Beginner's Mind

One almost has to admire the Zen-like simplicity of Howard Fineman's mind. Surely each moment is new for him. He seems blissfully unencumbered by the travails of history, or even, of recent months. Fineman lives completely in the "now" of each dawning news event.

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn't just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chainsaw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

Those of us more attached to the events of the last few years would be more likely to mark the decline of the presidency by things like a war of escalating tragedy three years after Bush declared "Mission Accomplished," the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, a speech on immigration that managed to offend Republicans and Democrats alike, the collapse of his grand vision for converting Social Security to private accounts, the squandering of international good will after 9/11 to the extent that America is now reviled around the world, the David Copperfield-like magic trick that turned an inherited surplus into the largest projected deficit in US history which continues to be fed by endless tax cuts for the wealthy, etc. etc. etc... Americans have retained knowledge of these occurrences even if Fineman hasn't and the demonstration of their impact is the death spiral of Bush's poll numbers, which have wallowed in the 30s for months.

Even though Fineman has chosen in the present moment to mark Bushco's demise by the happy event of Lay and Skilling's convictions, he wishes into the cornfield the enmeshment of this Administration with the machinations of Enron. Says Fineman:

First, caveats. There's no evidence that the president or anyone in his entourage knew about or benefited financially from the house of cards that Lay and Skilling built—and that a federal jury now has found to have been an edifice of fraud.

The Bush Crowd was old school in the energy bidness and viewed Lay & Co. as hustling parvenus who had no real interest in finding and pumping oil—what real men in Texas do.

Most of what Enron concocted was assembled in the go-go Clinton years. Bush's idea of an oilman was his old Bible-study buddy, the upright, clean-as-a-whistle Don Evans. As the Enron scam was falling apart, Lay frantically sought help from Evans—by then the Commerce secretary—among others (including Democrats such as former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin). He got nowhere, and had the chutzpah to be bitter about it.

It must be lovely to enjoy a mind so untroubled by facts. For a record more grounded in reality, Robert Parry has a memory span longer than the single beat of a hummingbird's wing.

Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.

As Enron's crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush's presidency, Lay secured Bush's help in three key ways:

--Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush's resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California's consumers.

--Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration's energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron's businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron's complex derivative-financing schemes.

--Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron's interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.

That's just the overview. For an article rich in detail on an effort on Dabhol that reached all the way the Vice President's office, Bush's complicity in extorting California, and Lay's involvement in the shaping of Federal energy policy, read the entire article here.

Good Morning Richard Cohen

Originally published: Friday, May 05, 2006

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, in my heart, I know I'm funny.
-- Good Morning Vietnam

"First, let me state my credentials," writes the Washington Post's Richard Cohen. "I am a funny guy." Such arrogance does not really invite further indulgence, but somehow I made it through the rest of his column. It only gets worse. Stephen Colbert, veteran of the legendary Second City and star of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," whose list of credits includes, "The Daily Show," "Strangers with Candy," "Exit 57," and Robert Smigel's "The Ambiguously Gay Duo"... not funny. And Cohen knows funny.

Not only wasn't the accomplished, comic actor, writer, and producer funny, he was "rude," and "a bully." Writes Cohen:

Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Riiiiight... A President who has exempted himself from over 750 laws, including a ban on torture; who has authorized wiretapping of private citizens without warrants; who lied this nation into a war that has now cost the lives of over 2400 service people and countless thousands of Iraqis; who entertained at this same event two years ago with his own comedic bit about looking under chairs, tables, and behind drapes for the non-existent WMD that were the pretext for that war... that President was held captive by rules of etiquette. Apparently we've been going about this thing all wrong. It's not Congress or due process of law we should be appealing to to rein this White House in. It's Miss Manners.

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, the man has got an irreverent tendency.
He did a very off-color parody of former VP Nixon.
General: I thought it was hilarious.
Lt. Steven Hauk: Respectfully, sir, the former VP
is a good man and a decent man.
General: Bullshit! I know Nixon personally.
He lugs a trainload of shit behind him that could
fertilize the Sinai. Why, I wouldn't buy an apple
from the son of a bitch and I consider him a
good, close, personal friend.

Cohen would have us know that there was nothing courageous about Stephen Colbert's performance.

His defenders -- and they are all over the blogosphere -- will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences -- maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or -- if you're at work -- take away your office.

What then, I wonder, is Cohen's excuse for reciting White House spin without question or scrutiny for the past five years? Cohen may consider himself the superior wit, but I for one think his drooling sycophant shtick is getting old.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush's Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" when he would have put it differently: "This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg." A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

I have a BA in English. That's my credential. Mr. Cohen, that's not a mixed metaphor.

Lt. Steven Hauk: "Good morning, Vietnam."
What the heck is that supposed to mean?
Private Abersold: I don't know, Lieutenant,
I guess it means good morning, Vietnam.