Through my network of contacts in the CIA, I have obtained one of the two CIA documents that former Vice President Dick Cheney says coroborate his longstanding arguments that torture was an effective interrogation and counterterrorism tool.

Well, OK, it’s not exactly the same document. But it’s about the same thing.

Glenn Greenwald has a serious commentary on the CIA documents released today. A federal prosecutor has been named.

You’ll love this.

The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.

What is this dastardly plan, you ask?

The plan is to turn a “day of fear” that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.

The writer, Mathew Vadum, is not joking. He actually thinks there is something “nihilistic” and “leftist” about a national day of service. And I especially like the “statist” part, after Bush’s shameless politicization of 9/11, which turned that day into an excuse for the Bush White House to use the Constitution as toilet paper.

If you read the article in its entirety, you pick up another important fact — many of the people behind the plot to turn the commemoration of 9/11 into “a day of activism, food banks, and community gardens” are black. Wow.

So instead of commemorating false bravado, panic, propaganda, foreign policy blunders and jingoism, we’re supposed to remember the day and honor the memory of those we lost by doing something positive to help each other. Yes, it’s an outrage.

If you read only one thing today (after this blog post, of course) make it “‘Truth’ vs. ‘facts’ from America’s media” by Neal Gabler at the Los Angeles Times. I don’t want to excerpt big chunks of it, because I hope you read the whole piece. But here’s the critical point:

According to the Pew Research Center, 16% of the stories in its media sample last week were devoted to healthcare, but three-quarters of that coverage was either about legislative politics or the town halls. …

…To look at this in a larger context, journalists would no doubt say that it isn’t really their job to ferret out the “truth.” It is their job to report “facts.” If Palin says that Obama intends to euthanize her child, they report it. If Limbaugh says that Obama’s healthcare plan smacks of Nazism, they report it. And if riled citizens begin shouting down their representatives, they report it, and report it, and report it. The more noise and the bigger the controversy, the greater the coverage. This creates a situation in which not only is the truth subordinate to lies, but one in which shameless lies are actually privileged over reasoned debate.

Don’t think the militants don’t know this and take full advantage of it.

I dimly remember way-back-when, whatever Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon spun about Vietnam was quickly shredded by the press. Indeed, the Washington press corps was so hard on LBJ I actually felt sorry for him sometimes, even though I didn’t especially like him. Nixon, of course, waged war on media. The whole business about “liberal media bias” comes from the Nixon propaganda machine, and “facts” about the voting habits of journalists, manufactured and promoted by the Nixon White House almost 40 years ago, still turn up in rightie rhetoric.

Even though investigative reporting was glamorized by the Watergate reporting team of Woodward-and-Bernstein (one word, back then), post-Nixon Washington political reporters were a defanged and neutered lot compared to the pre-Nixon pack. By the mid-1970s many of the right-wing “think tanks” that bulldoze right-wing propaganda through news media and into the heads of American citizens were being established by a group of moneyed family trusts — Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Coors, etc. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was established in 1973.

Out of post-Nixon journalism ethics came the idea that “objectivity” means journalists and editorialists stopped calling out politicians and political hacks for lying. As Paul Krugman once famously said, “if liberals said the Earth was round, while conservatives said it was flat, the news headlines would read ‘Shape of the planet: both sides have a point.'”

And we also saw the “Jerry Springerization” of political discourse. Right-wing party hacks and spokespeople were coached to keep talking, loudly, over everyone else and not allow people with other points of view to finish a sentence. You rarely saw anything like that on television in the 1950s and 1960s; by the 1980s it had become the norm. (See this post, “Where Have You Gone, Edward R. Murrow?” touching on this phenomenon that I wrote back in 2003, and which I think holds up pretty well.)

News show producers no doubt encouraged the mayhem because it made for more entertaining television; in the old days, a political talk show consisted of a bunch of gray-haired white guys in suits speaking politely and soberly to each other. Informative, but dull. If you see old black-and-white clips of the pre-1970s Meet the Press, you might notice the guests even spoke much more slowly and at more length than they do now, never mind one at a time.

The critical point is that U.S. journalists pretty much stopped offering truthful analysis of what politicians and spokespeople were saying. Instead, we get “he said, she said,” and the readers and viewers have to sort our for themselves what the truth is. Reporters like to see themselves as “in the middle” between two equal opposing forces, but Jay Rosen says this is a coward’s way out.

Like the “straight down the middle” impulse that Taylor writes about, he said, she said is not so much a truth-telling strategy as refuge-seeking behavior that fits well into newsroom production demands. “Taking a pass” on the tougher calls (like who’s blowing more smoke) is economical. It’s seen as risk-reduction, as well, because the account declines to explicitly endorse or actively mistrust any claim that is made in the account. Isn’t it safer to report, “Rumsfeld said”– letting Democrats in Congress howl at him (and report that) than it would be to report, “Rumsfeld said, erroneously”– and try to debunk the claim yourself? The first strategy doesn’t put your own authority at risk, the second does, but for a reason.

Going back to Neal Gabler, he reminds us of the months before the invasion of Iraq in which U.S. news media “reported the administration’s rationale without devoting more than a few sentences or minutes to dissenting voices, much less doing their own analysis.” After 9/11 and through the rest of Bush’s first term, to cast a shadow on Dear Leader — and especially to displease the Right — was a perilous thing that could (and sometimes did) cost a reporter his job.

The health care crisis has been building up for many years, and many of us saw it and realized our refusal to deal with it was dragging us off a cliff. But in all those years there was rarely a substantive discussion of this issue in mass media, and never on television or radio. Occasionally it would be addressed on a talk show, but the “addressing” inevitably consisted of a rightie hack screaming about socialized medicine and a slightly-less-to-the-right media personality allegedly speaking for progressivism who more or less agreed. All this would be encapsulated into a ten-minute segment that said absolutely nothing about the issue.

Gabler concludes,

What it comes down to is that sometimes the media have to tell the truth not because anyone really wants them to but because it is the right thing to do — the essential thing to do — for the sake of our democracy.

Taking refuge in the “middle” is not going to make journalism any safer going forward. The more journalists give in to the goons, the more they control you. And the goons are coming around to the idea that they are entitled to take a lot more than journalists’ jobs.

If there are people on your email list who think health care reform will erode the quality of health care in America, email this list of links to them.

T.R. Reid, “5 Myths About Health Care Around the World”

Ed Pilkington, “Dying for affordable healthcare — the uninsured speak”

Stephen Amidon, “Why I love Britain’s socialized healthcare system”

Paul E. Barber, “My Brain and the Ontario Health-Care System“

First, you should know that the FreedomWorks special ops unit that kidnapped invited me to an undisclosed location for discussion has treated me very well. I must say, that sodium pentathol stuff does clear your mind! And now that I’ve agreed to tell the truth about Obamacare, my hosts have turned off the Christian rock music they had been playing for me nonstop for several hours through concert-size speakers. I really appreciate that.

OK, so they caught us on the death panels. We might as well come clean. I know H.R.3200 doesn’t say anything about death panels, but it’s written in invisible ink between the lines in section 805, “TERMINATION OF ELECTION IN CASES OF SUBSTANTIAL NONCOMPLIANCE.” We liberals were coached to tell you that provision is about employers who don’t offer health benefits, but if you hold the paper under the right kind of lamp you see what it really says — If you don’t comply, you will be terminated.

In fact, the death panels have already met and made their determinations, and the death panel squads are ready to deploy as soon as they get the go-ahead from Kathleen Sebelius. But here’s another hint: If the death panel squads surround your house and ask you to surrender, all is not lost. You can invoke section 202, “EXCHANGE-ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS AND EMPLOYERS.” That means if you are on the death list, you may be eligible to be exchanged for someone else. If they accept your petition for review, that should give you at least six weeks to pack up and get out of the country. See? It’s not so bad.

I know the death panel thing sounds harsh, but you may be reassured to know they are faith-based death panels. The President has even been working with a group of rabbis to be sure that death panel determinations do not reflect anti-Jewish bias.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to get people to worship government as their religion. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that. But, y’know, once everyone realizes that Government Is God, they’ll accept the death panels. God’s will, and all that.

You’ll notice that several sections of H.R.3200 refer to “Medicare Part A.” What you don’t know is that the “A” stands for “Amabo,” which is “Obama” spelled backward. Medicare Part Amabo refers to a program in which older people will be bused to Canada, where the Canadian government has agreed to set them adrift on ice floes. This will not only lower health care costs, but will also save Social Security! Win-win!

You might argue that there has been a “Medicare Part A” for many years, but that just shows you how organized we liberals are. We’ve had this program secretly in place even before Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. The same operatives who planted Obama’s birth announcement in those Hawaiian newspapers in 1961 were already working out the deal with Canada. President Kennedy balked, but we took care of him, didn’t we?

As you know, we liberals were born with a genetic defect that gives us an uncontrollable urge to spend money and raise taxes. We claim we just want to have good government, but that’s just the excuse. We also want people to die on operating tables just so we can watch.

And once we get the health care/tax increase deal done, it’s on to the next project — changing the name of the country to “Union of Fascist-Socialist Republics.” It’s been the plan all along.

That’s all I know. Maybe there’s more, but since I’m a low-level operative there’s a lot they don’t tell me. And I’m sure I’ll see all of you soon, as soon as the nice man from United Health Care agrees to remove the electrodes.

Yesterday I quoted an article by Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post that the White House is surprised the Left is insisting on the public option. Today the leftie blogosphere is looking at this in two ways.

First, the “we’ve been punked” argument, as expressed by Digby:

But on a political level, the left has been betrayed over and over again on the things that matter to us the most. …

…After 2000, what is it going to take for the Democrats to realize that constantly using their base as a doormat is not a good idea? It only takes a few defections or enough people staying home to make a difference. And there are people on the left who have proven they’re willing to do it. The Democrats are playing with fire if they think they don’t have to deliver anything at all to their liberal base — and abandoning the public option, particularly in light of what we already know about the bailouts and the side deals, may be what breaks the bond.

It’s really not too much to ask that they deliver at least one thing the left demands, it really isn’t. And it’s not going to take much more of this before their young base starts looking around for someone to deliver the hope and change they were promised.

Amen, Sister Digby. See also Scarecrow at FDL.

Marc Ambinder reports that the White House thinks liberals will get on board with a plan that drops the public option but includes a mandate to buy insurance … from private insurance companies?

White House: Bite me.

On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler thinks that much of this noise about selling out the public option is coming from people with their own agendas to promote and is not reflective of what President Obama really thinks.

See also Mike Lux at Open Left:

What I discovered when I worked in the White House was that there were plenty of people who work in that building whose primary loyalty is not to the President but to themselves. They leak things to reporters to cultivate them and make sure they write puff job articles about them. They help certain lobbyists because they might want a job in their firm someday. They empower certain powerful Senators or members of Congress because they are personally close to them, and/or because they might want to get paid big money to lobby them someday soon. Maybe they want to run for office themselves one day, and so they cultivate certain donors.

So while it is possible that all the back-tracking on the President’s bill from anonymous staffers is all a carefully laid-out strategy, since it’s a strategy that is really not working, I think it is also quite possible it is just classic disloyalty from self-interested staffers.

The President will be holding a video conference on health care this afternoon that I plan to “attend.” I will report if he says anything to give us a clear indication of where he is on the public option.

Update: If you can’t watch the video, Steve Benen has a transcript.

“A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it “Fascism”, sometimes “Communism”, sometimes “Regimentation”, sometimes “Socialism”. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.” Franklin Roosevelt, on Social Security, June 28, 1934

The White House is feeling the pushback from the Left over talk of dropping the health care public option, and Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly report for the Washington Post that the White House is surprised.

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”

“It’s a mystifying thing,” he added. “We’re forgetting why we are in this.”

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president’s sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

“It took on a life of its own,” he said.

I don’t know that I can speak for anyone else, but for me, a plan that creates a big, national risk pool; that doesn’t have to make a profit; that can streamline administrative costs; and which cannot refuse applicants for any reason, is the one part of the bill that holds out real hope of meaningful change. By itself it won’t do enough to cut costs or expand health care delivery, but it would bring immediate relief to millions of Americans.

WaPo‘s Steven Pearlstein argues that a good bill can be passed without the public option, and liberals ought to be willing to let it go. I respect Pearlstein’s opinions, but I fear “co ops” and “exchanges” will turn out to be mirages — programs that look like reform from a distance, and which sound great on paper, but which turn out to be useless for most people who need help. I’ve run into too many programs like that already, and I suspect most of you have as well.

Although I’d rather have single payer, I’d be happy with this: Everyone, younger and older, sick and healthy, in one risk pool. Easy applications. No preconditions to be met. Just say, hey, I need insurance. Where do I send the premium checks? And poof, you are insured. End of process. Simple and practical.

The more complicated it is,the more hoops citizens have to jump through to make it work for them, the bigger the cracks through which to fall. And when I hear “exchanges” and “co ops,” I hear “hoops to jump through.” Maybe I’m being stubborn. But the time has come to be stubborn.

The insurance co op idea was being floated as a possible alternative to the public option, and now the Republican leadership in Congress has rejected it. So, screw ’em. Why are we wasting any more time trying to please them? No matter what the Dems do, the Republicans are going to reject it.

Indeed, Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny report for the New York Times that Democrats now seem inclined to “go it alone.”

Steve Benen says,

This week, however, we seem to have reached the tipping point. A variety of GOP leaders explained that Dems could drop the public option altogether, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who’s become increasingly belligerent about the very idea of reform, said he’s prepared to vote against his own compromise bill. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) announced that Republicans will reject reform no matter what’s in the bill.

Fine. Thanks for being honest. Now, get out of the way.

Amazing. At a conservative rally, local news stations were interviewing an Israeli man who was praising national health care in Israel. During his remarks, a woman yelled out, “Heil Hitler!”

The man stopped, became visibly upset, and exclaimed, “Did you hear this? She say to a Jew, ‘Heil Hitler’! Hear? I’m a Jew! You’re telling me, ‘Heil Hitler’? Shame of you!” After he angrily confronts her, the woman mocks him by making a crying sound to imply he is a whining baby.

Go watch the video.

You don’t have to be Freud to understand why some people, men in particular, feel inadequate unless they are packing. On the other hand, I suspect that people who bring loaded firearms to a presidential appearance are doing so to display aggression and hostility, not to commit a violent act. I assume that someone openly carrying a firearm is not planning to assassinate the President, but rather is using the firearm to make a symbolic statement.

A British journalist, Shaun Waterman, writes,

This is legal in New Hampshire apparently – the gun was registered and not concealed, and the man was on private property – and as the New York Times has noted, the two incidents in Portsmouth are not the only ones where firearms have turned up, legally or otherwise, in the hands of anti-health care reform protesters. All of which underscores a fact about the American right which bears repeating for a foreign observer: These people are armed.

Let’s be clear: No one is predicting the assassination of President Obama, or anyone else.

In the much-maligned and now withdrawn DHS intelligence assessment that warned earlier this year of the potential threat posed by resurgent right-wing extremists, there was no mention of assassination, and indeed the authors state that though “Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president […] they have not yet turned to attack planning” of any kind.

And yet, when one considers the availability of firearms to protesters with an angry narrative of victimization, and the growing influence of a movement which glorifies violence against African-Americans, one can hardly avoid a sense of foreboding.

Of course, the “pro life” movement didn’t plan the assassination of George Tiller, either. They incited it, but they didn’t plan it. That makes them innocent, see.

Here are a couple of dueling headlines, both published August 13:

“Conservative Groups Dismiss Report on Rise of Militias” (Fox News)

“Extremist militias see resurgence under President Obama’s tenure” (New York Daily News)

They aren’t militias. They are concerned patriots with guns preparing to take the government into their own hands through force because they don’t respect the results of an election. Oh, and they love the Constitution.

Paul Harris, The Guardian:

Welcome to the disturbing new face of the radical right in America. Across the country, extremism is surging, inflamed by conservative talkshow hosts, encouraged by Republican leaders and propagating a series of wild conspiracy theories. Many fear it might end in tragedy.

Obama has been labelled as a threat to democracy and an anti-white racist by senior presenters on the TV channel Fox News. Republicans, seizing on the fierce debate over Obama’s plans to reform healthcare, have called him a socialist who plans “death panels” for the elderly. Rumours have circulated that Obama was not born in America and that he plans to ban firearms. Despite having no basis in fact, they have become widely believed. A recent poll in Virginia showed only 53% of voters believed Obama was born in the US. In neighbouring North Carolina, 54% of voters shared that opinion.

Such extremism is becoming a major security issue, prompting fears of an attack on Obama’s life or some other incident of domestic terrorism. “This is a very dangerous situation that can spin off ‘lone wolf’ individuals who decide now is the time to act against people they see as an enemy,” said Chip Berlet, author of a book on rightwing extremists.

I could go on and on. The syndrome is a racial-religious nationalism combined with a persecution complex, which you can find represented in various ways in many cultures. This syndrome is the cause of most, if not all, of the mass violence in the world today. You see it all over the Middle East. You see it in Sri Lanka. You see it wherever people have persuaded themselves that they are entitled to enforce their will through violence, because they have Right on their side, and the other side is Evil.

This is the most dangerous force in the world today, and the leadership of the Right is stoking it for all they’re worth.

The forces of civility already are bowing to the pressure of the mob. We might remember that people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts were not allowed to be within view of Dear Leader, whereas law enforcement can do very little about visibly angry people carrying loaded firearms in the streets.

Sadly, No:

Number of U.S. Presidents killed by firearms: 4
Number of U.S. Presidents killed by t-shirts: 0 (so far!)

But you know that if the Obama Administration tried to enforce the same rules against gun-toting righties that the Bushies enforced against T-shirt wearing lefties, it would give more fuel to those stoking the fire, and the “aggression” would get worse. So, yes, the situation is already out of control. People are either going to calm down on their own, or the aggression/hostility will escalate until somebody gets killed.