Category Archives: conservatism

The Usual Suspects

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You knew Maureen Dowd would have something to say about The Incident. Today’s column (via True Blue Liberal) doesn’t disappoint, as she describes the “swift-BB-ing” of Harry Whittington.

Private citizens have been enlisted to blame the victim. Maybe poor Mr. Whittington put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was, after all, behind Vice, not in front of him. And the hunter pulling the trigger is supposed to make sure he has a clear shot. Wouldn’t it be, well, classy for Shooter to express just a bit of contrition and humility?

Instead, the usual sliming has begun, with the Cheney camp trying to protect the vice president by casting a veteran hunter as Elmer Dud.

Indeed, righties are lashing out at everyone in North America except those in the Bush Administration. Get this editorial at National Review Online:

Never has an accidental shooting occasioned so much glee. Whatever mistakes Vice President Dick Cheney might have made while hunting on the Armstrong Ranch in Texas this weekend, or in deciding how to make the mishap public, have been eclipsed by the disgusting wallowing in the accident of all his critics and the unsurpassable self-regard of national reporters outraged by a delay of at least 14 hours in getting alerted to the story. They worked themselves into a first-class tizzy at Monday’s White House press briefing, proving that no matter what the story is, reporters think it’s all about them. It is understandable that Cheney would not consider notifying the media his first priority following an accident during a quail-hunting trip with friends, and the meaning that is being read into the incident — about Cheney’s character, the administration’s competence, Bush’s foreign policy, and much else — is absurd.

This little tantrum is followed by the mild suggestion that, um, maybe the Veep should make a public statement now. But how juvenile is this? NRO sounds like a kid who got in trouble for not doing his homework and who then complains to Mom and Dad that Teacher picks on me.

Dear righties: Vice screwed up. Big Time. Stop making excuses for him and let him take his lumps like a man.

Fact is, even some Republicans are acknowledging that Cheney’s behavior is seriously weird. Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker write in today’s Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney’s slow and unapologetic public response to the accidental shooting of a 78-year-old Texas lawyer is turning the quail-hunting mishap into a political liability for the Bush administration and is prompting senior White House officials to press Cheney to publicly address the issue as early as today, several prominent Republicans said yesterday.

The Republicans said Cheney should have immediately disclosed the shooting Saturday night to avoid even the suggestion of a coverup and should have offered a public apology for his role in accidentally shooting Harry Whittington, a GOP lawyer from Austin. …

… “I cannot believe he does not look back and say this should have been handled differently,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is close to the White House. Weber said Cheney “made it a much bigger issue than it needed to be.”

Marlin Fitzwater, a former Republican White House spokesman, told Editor & Publisher magazine that Cheney “ignored his responsibility to the American people.”

This episode does speak volumes about Dick Cheney’s character. And what it’s saying isn’t good. Whatever happened in that quail hunt, the fact that the Vice President couldn’t even tell the President what happened, and that he still cannot publicly state that he is sorry he pulled that trigger, bespeaks a pathological lack of character.

This is genuinely disturbing. Even your standard sociopath could have managed an act of contrition for the public once he understood it was in his best interest to do so.

And if the Veep is so unglued by a hunting accident that he can neither inform the President nor speak in public about it, what’s he doing a heartbeat away from the presidency?

David Sanger writes in today’s New York Times that The Incident has created a serious rift between the President’s and Vice President’s staffs. “The tension between President Bush’s staff and Mr. Cheney’s has been palpable,” Sanger writes.

Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney’s office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. … In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush’s staff.

Um, so who’s in charge?

At WaPo, David Ignatius placed The Incident in the context of “An Arrogance of Power.” The Bush Administration, he writes, has become intoxicated with a belief in its own “God-given mission.”

I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren’t for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration’s misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.

The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush’s statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had “derailed” a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush’s account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush’s comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.

“Bush and Cheney are in the bunker,” Ignatius concludes. “That’s the only way I can make sense of their actions.” And the hard-core culties are in the bunker with them, outraged that anyone dare question the Vice President’s actions.

Criticize a politician? In America? Unthinkable. Our dear leaders are beyond reproach. Unless they’re Democrats.

(Cross-posted to The American Street)

That Liberal Media

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There are some must-read items on the web today — let’s start with Digby’s “Dispatches From The Fever Swamp.”

The president’s approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the reporting in the mainstream media or by the “reasonable” Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don’t say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush’s approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catastrophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush’s powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections —- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

It’s a beautiful thing to see reality crystallized into a few concise sentences. Makes me want to cry. But this is why I started blogging. What was being reported as “news” on television and in newspapers was such obvious propaganda, such nonsense, I had to speak up.

Among the few negative emails I got after the recent C-SPAN gig were from gentlemen (why always men?) who patiently lectured me that news media is overwhelmingly liberal and for me to say otherwise was a self-evident lie. And I think, who am I supposed to believe — the Republican Noise Machine or my own lying eyes? And there’s no use arguing with them, you know. They’ve been told all their lives that the media is “liberal.” If you go back to the early 1950s you find Joe McCarthy saying it. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew declared all-out war on media in the early 1970s. Rightie talk radio, Faux News, and the rest of the echo chamber pour this lie into the ears of millions of non-thinking listeners, who accept “liberal media bias” as gospel.

That excellent resource Media Matters has a new study out called “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005.” The executive summary is here; the full report in PDF format is here. And the report tells us what any viewer with a usable brain surely has noticed — the guest lists of the Sunday television political programs are lopsidedly right-wing. “Panel discussions” also tilt right. In the crucial period leading up to the Iraq invasion, congressional opponents of the Iraq invasion were largely absent from the Sunday shows.

What’s particularly galling to me are the phony liberals — people who don’t speak for us liberals and progressives at all, yet they represent us on television. For example, take Christopher Hitchens and Joe Klein. Please.

Kevin Drum discusses the Media Matters report and also links to an article by Paul Waldman in the current Washington Monthly:

This ideological imbalance isn’t only evident in the “official” sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly “balanced” by journalists from major newspapers.

….The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow “balanced” by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are “liberal” almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.

Kevin says,

The result is that genuinely liberal pundits get almost no exposure on these shows. You get conservative guests, super-conservative guests, moderate liberals, and journalists. And though it’s not part of this study, they’re almost all men. Only 10% of the guests on Sunday talk shows are women.

Some balance.

And this is particularly strange when you consider that the right-wingers are to the right of the majority of Americans on many issues. For example, 62 percent of adults recently polled by CBS News and the New York Times said that the “federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.” If you listen to “mainstream” political talk shows, however, you’d think the only people supporting this view are the far-left Marxist fringe.

The right-wing agenda is presented incessantly on mainstream media; genuinely progressive policy ideas are rarely presented at all. Yet the media has a “liberal” bias. Uh-huh.

While you’re at Hullabaloo reading Digby, see also this post by Tristero. Excellent. For example:

The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

We can’t return America to the people without straightening out the problems in media, IMO. Democracy can’t work unless the people are truthfully informed. And when they aren’t seeing their real concerns being addressed by the political psychobabblers on television, most people will just tune out politics as being kind of pointless. And the Wingnuts will continue to run our beautiful country into the ground, because people don’t even know they might have had another choice.

The Democratic Party seems largely unable to pull itself together and push back. There are individual Democrats who are terrific people. But any Democrat who sticks his neck out is instantly, and visciously, smeared throughout news media, and the Dem Party won’t provide cover.

So it’s left to the Blogosphere to push back. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.

Oops II

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CNN is reporting that Harry Whittington, the man “peppered” by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident, suffered a “mild” heart attack. Yes, this the same guy who’s been in the hospital since Saturday even though he’s just fine. Somehow, some birdshot that had “peppered” Mr. Whittington’s face migrated to his heart.

Uh-HUH.

This is starting to remind me of the “cat on the roof” joke.

Meanwhile, Dr. Atrios has learned that “Every conservative on the internet is an avid hunter and they’ve all been shot multiple times.” Suggestion: Stay out of the woods in red states.

In other news, Dr. Atrios observes the Stalinist discipline of rightie bloggers and Glenn Greenwood suggests that righties may have some double standards (Really? Wow!).

Update: See Dan Froomkin, “Loose Cannon.“

Michelle’s a Twit

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Proving once again that she lacks a basic appreciation of traditional American culture and values, Michelle Malkin is outraged at Dana Milbank’s gentle ribbing of the Vice President on last night’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

If you watch Countdown, you know that the program mixes humor with hard news. So it was not at all out of keeping with the show’s format for reporter Dana Milbank to appear dressed in an orange vest and hat. His current location was near the vice president’s residence, he said.

Cute, I thought.

But Michelle Malkin and others on the Right are on a rampage. Media bias! they scream. They want to know when Countdown will display a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.” Can they not tell the difference between good-natured kidding and hateful meanness? I’d hate to sit down to a family dinner with these folks.

In some ways its a sign of respect to be able to kid our leaders. It says we’re comfortable enough with them to tease them. And Americans have made fun of our leaders since the guys at Valley Forge sat around the campfire and badmouthed George Washington. Some of our most-beloved humorists — Mark Twain, Bob Hope and Will Rogers come to mind — showed how it was possible to poke fun at leaders — often in their presence — without being mean about it. Here’s an example from Will Rogers —

The fire at the Treasury Department started on the roof and burned down until it got the place where the money ought to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it. A fire in the Treasury Building is nothing to get excited about during a Republican Administration.

Damn, that’s still funny.

Malkin et al. will argue that Dana Milbank is not a humorist, but a journalist. To which I might say, since news coverage is a joke, what’s the difference? (Ba-bump BUMP) But I think it could be argued (to anyone not a twit) that Milbank’s costume showed a pro-Cheney bias. It signalled the audience that this is not a serious story. Nothing to get fired up about. Let’s have a chuckle and forget about it.

Believe me, a reporter with a real anti-Cheney bias would have taken a more sober approach to this story. In fact, I bet the White House has a crack team of joke writers on the job right now …

Updates: See “Cheney Accident Triggers Jokes on Late-Night TV“; “After Cheney’s Shooting Incident, Time to Unload“; “Groans at Home Re: (Cheney Joke Here).” See also Ezra Klein.

Update update: Boy, was I right about the White House crack team of joke writers, or what? Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:

The White House has decided that the best way to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident is to joke about it.

President Bush’s spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn’t be confused for hunter’s safety wear.

“The orange that they’re wearing is not because they’re concerned that the vice president may be there,” joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. “That’s why I’m wearing it.”

The president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, took a similar jab after slapping an orange sticker on his chest from the Florida Farm Bureau that read, “No Farmers, No Food.”

“I’m a little concerned that Dick Cheney is going to walk in,” the governor cracked during an appearance in Tampa Monday.

Oops

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I doubt this was intentional — I just pulled this screen capture off Memeorandum:

Two news items collide — at the top, a pack of righties attack Al Gore for speaking frankly to a mainly Saudi audience about mistreatment of Arabs in America after 9/11. Judging from the reaction of the righties, you’d have thought Al had announced his engagement to Osama bin Laden.

Among the headlines: “The Gorebot: attacking America from the fountainhead of jihad”; “Al of Arabia”; “Al Gore Slanders America” (that’s our gal Michelle Malkin); and “Al Gore Sells Out to the Saudis” (Captain Ed).

The news stories following: “Report: U.S. Is Abusing Captives” and “UN inquiry demands immediate closure of Guantanamo.”

I got a kick out of the accidental juxtaposition, although to be fair the juxtaposed stories are about two different incidents of abuse. Of the first (from the Associated Press)—

Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been “indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable.”

Which is true — the bleeping U.S. Department of Justice issued a report admitting it’s true — and which I doubt was news to the audience. Righties seem to think that all “foreigners” are stupid and will not know anything about our treatment of them unless we explain it to them. But all human being appreciate not being treated like idiots. Mr. Gore’s talk probably did more to assure Arabs we can be honest and reasonable than all of Karen Hughes’s pathetic efforts combined.

(What makes this speech treasonous in rightie minds is that Al Gore delivered it to an Arab audience. These same people razz Gore for everything he says in this country, too, however. According to the Right, “Al Gore speaking” is, by definition, treasonous.)

Oh, and speaking of “the fountainhead of jihad,” the Associated Press reported Saturday (via Avedon) that

A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism.

The Bush administration considers the UAE an important ally in the fight against terrorism since the suicide hijackings and is not objecting to Dubai Ports World’s purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

And Republicans ask if we can trust Democrats to keep us safe from terrorism. Snort.

The second news story is about treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Maggie Farley of the Los Angeles Times writes,

A draft United Nations report on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay concludes that the U.S. treatment of them violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture.

It also urges the United States to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington’s justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.

The report, compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, is the product of an 18-month investigation ordered by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

“We have fallen pretty far when the UN is lecturing us on our human rights violations,” says Steve Soto.

From the Telegraph:

The UN Human Rights Commission report, due to be published this week, concludes that Washington should put the 520 detainees on trial or release them.

It calls for the United States to halt all “practices amounting to torture”, including the force-feeding of inmates who go on hunger strike.

Jeanne d’Arc describes this:

Guards have begun strapping detainees into “restraint chairs” like the one pictured to the left, using riot-control soldiers to keep them still (no details on that), and forcing long plastic tubes down their nasal passages and into their stomachs. The tubes are inserted and removed so violently that prisoners bleed and pass out. Too much food is put in the tubes, which causes prisoners to defecate on themselves.

If you’re strapped into a “padded cell on wheels,” while a tube is forced down your nose, that means you’re no longer refusing meals.

This will sully America’s reputation for generations. Yet the righties are up in arms about Al Gore? Amazing.

A Grand Hypocrisy

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Yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a post called “Do Bush followers have a political ideology?” in which he argues that much of the Right has utterly abandoned principle and has devolved into a George W. Bush personality cult. “Whether one is a ‘liberal’ — or, for that matter, a ‘conservative’ — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views,” Glenn writes, “but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.” It’s a great post, and spot on.

I thought of this post this morning when I ran across this article by Elisabeth Bumiller in today’s New York Times. It begins:

What happens if you’re a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?

For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your analytical skills.

“Nobody will touch me,” said Bruce Bartlett, author of the forthcoming “Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” “I think I’m just kind of radioactive at the moment.”

What follows is the sad tale of how Mr. Bartlett, a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first President Bush, became persona non grata in the rightie think tank crowd because of this book. Of course, we’re mostly getting Mr. Bartlett’s side of the story here; could be there are other reasons for his prolonged unemployment. Still …

Glenn writes,

The blind faith placed in the Federal Government, and particularly in our Commander-in-Chief, by the contemporary “conservative” is the very opposite of all that which conservatism has stood for for the last four decades. The anti-government ethos espoused by Barry Goldwater and even Ronald Reagan is wholly unrecognizable in Bush followers, who – at least thus far – have discovered no limits on the powers that ought to be vested in George Bush to enable him to do good on behalf of all of us.

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

This is not hyperbole. These people are frightening. Glenn provides proof in his post. Do a search for “Malkin” on this blog and you’ll find a lot more proof. And, unfortunately, these people have been able to implant their warped worldview on a big chunk of “mainstream media.”

In the comments to Glenn’s post, Jay Rosen notes,

The dynamic you identify–liberal means anyone who questions Bush–was a major factor in the blow-up surrounding the Dec. 10th column by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, The Two Washington Posts, in which she wrote: “Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s ‘White House Briefing,’ which is highly opinionated and liberal.”

To this day Howell doesn’t realize that she misspoke. She didn’t mean “liberal,” she meant “critical of Bush.” But she doesn’t know it because of the phenomenon you describe here.

Neither she nor the Post reporters who “don’t like” White House Briefing could find in Froomkin’s work any liberal positions taken, because he does not take such positions. He holds Bush accountable and subjects him to rigorous scrutiny, and he certainly doesn’t like the way the White House operates. There’s nothing “liberal” about that.

I wrote about it, and Dan testified about it, here.

On top of that, there is a mindset among the Right that says labeling any opinion “liberal” makes it self-evidently false. One need to argue why it is false, or find flaws in the argument’s logic or presentation. The word “liberal” (or variants thereof, like “leftie”) covers all ground. Glenn discusses this today in a follow-up to yesterday’s post.

Most (though not all) of the responses were quite heavy on name-calling and extremely light on substantive replies to the actual points in the post. More notable than the unsurprising fact that the post prompted lots of name-calling is the specific name-calling insults that were chosen. Almost invariably, bloggers told their readers that what I wrote can be disregarded because I’m just a “leftist” and a “lefty” and a “liberal” spewing forth the “KosHuff” party line.

According to Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse, for instance, my “writing is little more than a tired echo of what conservatives can read on a daily basis at Kos or any other lock-step lefty blog where Bush Derangement Syndrome reigns supreme.” And at Little Green Footballs (more on it below), my post won the award for “Leftist Lie of the Day” and was held up as an example of “dishonest, ethically-challenged childish babbling that passes for leftist ‘debate’ in this modern age.”

So, they label the argument and the person making it “leftist” and “liberal” and – presto! – no more need to address the arguments or consider its substance because it’s all been shooed away with one fell swoop of name-calling cliches.

(Note that Glenn links to Little Green Footballs, which is something I will not do. It just encourages them. If you are all-fired determine to find the site, it isn’t that hard.)

The name-calling phenomenon is old news here. Nearly all rightie comments to The Mahablog are nothing but name-calling. As you regulars know, it is my policy to delete any message that consists of nothing but insults to me or another commenter, which pretty much takes care of most of the right-wing stuff that gets left here. And, nearly always, the poster who gets deleted emails me about it and whines that I should be more broad-minded and willing to listen to other points of view (expressed with more invective, of course). Personal insults, however, do not constitute a “point of view” in my book.

Now, I think it’s true that there are real conservatives Out There who are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Bush Regime. This is something I want to explore in more posts. But if you are looking at most leading bloggers and media spokespeople of the Right, you are looking at Bush culties, not conservatives.

Update: Do Bush supporters hate America?

One of the ignorant nimrods who regularly write to this paper to call me a Marxist argues that those who disagree with the president are delighted to see America fail, that people like me take pleasure in anything that gives comfort to our enemies. He argues that people who question the reckless use of the military are “pacifist military haters.” There is no truth to such baseless and childish nonsense, but he seems to think it sounds persuasive, or perhaps he thinks it’s a kind of logical argument.

That’s one of the reasons it’s difficult not to think some of these Bush supporters are just willfully stupid.

These people grow more tiresome as they have less and less with which to argue. Their recourse, it seems, is to tag people they disagree with by calling them “leftists” and “liberals,” as if those words cancel out all arguments.

The Vegetable Speaks

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David Brooks says that liberal blogs maintain a “Stalinist line of discipline.” Think Progress has the transcript from today’s Chris Matthews Show — think Dumb and Dumber:

DAVID BROOKS: Whoever the Democratic candidate, that is the weakness of the Democratic party, they’ve got the blogs and the netroots who are semi-nuts and they insist on a Stalinist line of discipline.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I love your objectivity.

DAVID BROOKS: It’s objectively true. I did a psychoanalytic test.

I read that, and it occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I’ve posted Brooks’s picture. So there ’tis.

The truth is, it’s the Right that marches in Stalinist discipline. Hell, the Right is more like the Borg Collective than a political movement. See (via Avedon) “The Democrats’ Tiny Megaphone” by Robert Parry:

Wealthy progressives and liberal foundations can match up almost dollar for dollar with conservative funders. But the American Left has adopted largely a laissez-faire attitude toward media infrastructure, while the Right has applied almost socialistic values to sustain even unprofitable media ventures.

Indeed, the Right’s subsidizing of media may be the most under-reported money-in-politics story in modern American history. Many good-government organizations track the millions of dollars contributed to candidates, but much less attention is paid to the billions of unregulated dollars poured into media.

This imbalanced attention continues even though the conservative media is arguably the most important weapon in the Republican arsenal.

And all the while they do this they scream that the “media” is infested with “liberal bias.” Strangely, the only news program this liberal can stand to sit through any more is Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” on MSNBC. The rest of them on all channels are mostly far-Right propaganda. I swear, if MSNBC ever messes with Olbermann I will call up the Mighty Maha Army (all six of us) and march on Rockefeller Plaza.

Back to Parry:

Political “propaganda themes” – often coordinated with GOP leaders – are distributed instantaneously across the country, reaching into both rural and urban America with a repetition that gives these messages a corroborative ring of truth.

The messages echo from talk radio to cable news to conservative columnists who appear in the mostly pro-Republican local newspapers. The themes then are reinforced in magazine articles and in books that dominate the shelves of many American bookstores.

Over the past two decades, Republicans have exploited this media capability with great deftness in consolidating power across large swaths of the country, especially where there is little media diversity (i.e. the Red States).

And the Right Blogosphere is an integral part of the Republican Noise Machine.

In essence, the right-wing media – a vertically integrated machine reaching from books, magazines and newspapers to radio, television and the Internet – has the power to make almost any ludicrous notion seem real and threatening to millions of Americans.

If Karl Rove wants people to believe John Kerry faked his war injuries, in spite of documentation and eyewitness accounts to the contrary, all he has to do is whistle. The Machine will be sure that’s the story the public hears, nonsense or not. If Karl wants to tweak the paranoia of the Christian Right, he yanks the chains and, suddenly, the Machine is spewing out nonsense about a war on Christmas. Smooth as butter. In comparison, the Left can barely coordinate its socks.

Along these same lines: If you haven’t already, be sure to read Peter Daou’s “THE TRIANGLE: Matthews, Moore, Murtha, and the Media,” “THE (Broken) TRIANGLE: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness” and “Scandal Fatigue, Catnip, and the ‘Angry’ Left.”

Bushies in Training

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I’ve been to Fulton, Missouri. It’s close to Columbia, home of the main campus of the University of Missouri. Winston Churchill delivered the famous “iron curtain” speech there, which is its chief claim to fame. Like most little Missouri towns it’s very conservative and very insulated.

But this spring, high school students in Fulton will be presenting a shockingly provocative play. A play featuring juvenile runaways, couple swapping, and the wanton seduction of a human-animal creature (A hybrid? Who can say?) by a supernatural pagan female.

The town of Fulton is outraged. But not about the play described above, a sexy romp called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by some guy named Shakespeare. No, they’re messed up because the high school dramatists produced a sanitized version of “Grease.”

The drama teacher cleaned up profanity and substituted standard tobacco cigarettes for “weed.” But that wasn’t good enough. According to Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times, a few people complained

… that scenes of drinking, smoking and a couple kissing went too far, and glorified conduct that the community tries to discourage. One letter, from someone who had not seen the show but only heard about it, criticized “immoral behavior veiled behind the excuse of acting out a play.”

The school has cancelled a production of “The Crucible” (of course) and will produce “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” instead. So instead of pilgrims battling witchcraft (the Fultonites won’t know it’s an allegory if nobody tells ’em) they’ll produce what is, essentially, a sex farce. Will the drama teacher edit out some of Bill S.’s more obvious double entendres? And will Titania still seduce Bottom, or will she take him to an all-night revival?

What Puck said: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Ann Coulter Unhinged

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And they say liberals are unhinged … Max Blumenthal writes,

On Friday, February 10, the rock star of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was none other than Ann Coulter. Before an overflow crowd of at least 1000 young right-wing activists, Coulter took her brand of performance art to new heights. Afterwards, I caught up with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to ask him about Coulter’s characterization of Muslims as “ragheads.” Before I reveal his indignant response, here is a sampling of Coulter’s most memorable lines.

Coulter on Muslims:

“I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'” (This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation.)

Coulter on killing Bill Clinton:

(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemma) “There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought ‘Ann, that’s not going to help your career.'” …

See also “Ann Coulter: ‘We Need Somebody to Put Rat Poisoning in Justice Stevens’ Creme Brulee” at Editor & Publisher.

Compare/contrast to moi. You can find a link to today’s C-SPAN Washington Journal on this page, under “Video/Audio.” I didn’t threaten to kill anybody, right?

Update: See also Digby. And see Jane for more examples of the evil liberal elitist media at work!