Why Democrats Make Me Crazy

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One of the few points that Right and Left agree on these days is that the Democratic Party is seriously screwed up. We disagree as to how and why it is screwed up, yes. But even the party’s most loyal supporters can be driven to despair by what passes for Dem Party leadership.

Robert Kuttner’s opinion piece in today’s Boston Globe illustrates a part of the problem. Kuttner quotes Harry Reid singing the praises of Senator Russ Feingold:

”An example of how people really appreciate your standing up for what you believe is Russ Feingold, the only person [in the Senate] to vote against the Patriot Act — the only person. The Republicans in 2004 spent tons of money going after him on that one issue, and it didn’t matter because people believed that Russ Feingold did it because he thought it was the right thing to do.”

How nice. But, Kuttner writes,

Now, the Patriot Act is about to be extended, with only the most trivial sops to civil liberties. And guess who is all alone, yet again?

Senator Russ Feingold.

When Democrats agreed to support an extension making only superficial changes, Feingold vowed to filibuster. On Thursday, the Senate voted to end debate. Exactly two other senators voted with Feingold. One was octogenarian Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who carries a copy of the Constitution around in his pocket. The other was the flinty former Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont, the Senate’s lone independent.

Reid, who so admires Feingold’s courage, left Feingold all alone yet again.

This reminds me of what the Dems did with Congressman Jack Murtha. Murtha had the courage to stand up and present an alternative to the Bushie “stay the course” Iraq policy. Once the inevitable personal smears of Murtha, including slanders of his service record, picked up steam on the Right, it seems to me most Democrats retreated behind cover and left Murtha alone and exposed. This in spite of the fact that Murtha’s proposal polled well, as Chris Bowers explained at MyDD last month. Chris wrote,

People want to hear alternatives on Iraq, and they like what Murtha has proposed. Republicans would rather slander a veteran. If only we had an administration in charge of this country that was willing to listen to strong, pragmatic, and popular approaches to policy, rather than one that is hellbent on theory, ideology, and national division. If only we had a Democratic opposition that was willing to support strong, pragmatic, and popular ideas on troop deployment in Iraq when those ideas arise from within their own ranks. Right now, I don’t think we have either.

I’ve written before that the Dems in Washington are so snakebit by the VRWC that they won’t stand up for progressive policy proposals even when polls show strong popular support for those proposals. Makes me crazy, I tell you.

Feingold didn’t pay a political price for voting against the Patriot Act. “Indeed, last year, when John Kerry carried Wisconsin by a bare 12,000 votes, Feingold sailed to reelection by more than 330,000 votes,” Kuttner says.

So what are the Dems afraid of?

Kuttner continues,

What better moment to reign in Bush’s extra-constitutional power-grab than when the Patriot Act is up for review? But, no. That might seem ”un-Patriotic” (get it?). As Feingold declared,”If Democrats aren’t going to stand up to an executive who disdains the other branches of government and doesn’t worry about trampling on the rights of innocent Americans, what do we stand for?”

Good question. As Harry Reid correctly observes, Bush can wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 all he wants; voters don’t punish legislators such as Feingold who stand up for principle. One such principle, surely, is that this nation must remain a constitutional democracy. That notion is also good politics. It has been since 1789.

Feingold’s courage needs to be honored, not by celebrating him as a brave loner, but by following his leadership. Legislators of both parties need to preserve our liberties, despite ominous claims of permanent war and unchecked power. If not, God save the Republic.

I think a large part of the Dems’ problem is that too many influential Dems — Hillary Clinton comes to mind — won’t lead, won’t follow, and won’t get out of the way.

If you google for “what’s wrong with democrats” you are treated to a wealth of opinions. The answer is economic populism, says one. Or they need to have vision. They need think tanks like the righties’ think tanks. They need to pay attention to the base. They need to ignore the base. Whatever.

I’m thinking that Step One might be to learn to watch each others’ backs. Until they learn to do that, I’m not sure “vision” will help them much.

See also: Michael Grunwald, “In Defense of Finger-Pointing“

Dyscalculia and Me

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Lots of people are razzng Richard Cohen today for his column “What Is the Value of Algebra?” Background: Los Angeles high school students must pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate, and this requirement is causing inordinate numbers of students to drop out in their senior years. Cohen points to one student who failed algebra six times in six semesters, and who finally abandoned her books and disappeared from the school. He writes,

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time — the only proof I’ve ever seen of divine intervention — somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know — never mind want to know — how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later — or something like that.

Now, I detected some tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating humor in Cohen’s article, but some of my favorite bloggers were quite upset by it. PZ Myers of Pharyngula writes,

Because Richard Cohen is ignorant of elementary mathematics, he can smugly tell a young lady to throw away any chance being a scientist, a technician, a teacher, an accountant; any possibility of contributing to science and technology, of even being able to grasp what she’s doing beyond pushing buttons. It’s Richard Cohen condescendingly telling someone, “You’re as stupid as I am; give up.” And everything he said is completely wrong.

Shakespeare’s Sister:

I’m not being cheeky. I’m genuinely wondering. Because he seems to have struggled so mightily with basic math that it suggests a possible undiagnosed learning disability, which isn’t a funny thing. It also sounds like the girl in his linked column to whom he’s directing the bad advice that math doesn’t matter–a girl who failed “algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it” and subsequently dropping out of school–may well have an undiagnosed learning disability, too. And that makes his column not just ridiculous or ill-advised, but tragic.

The ever-gentlemanly Kevin Drum is a little kinder:

Cohen’s serious point isn’t really whether algebra is useful or not, it’s whether it should be required to graduate from high school. That is, if you find yourself completely unable to fathom algebra, should you be condemned to spend the rest of your life as a high school dropout? I don’t really have an opinion about this, but it’s a serious question.

On the other hand, Cohen says he can’t do percentages either, and if that’s the case then maybe he should go back to high school.

Sorry, I’m with Richard. Yes, being math-impaired is a learning disability, and I have it. I recognized this years ago, and through all these years I have managed to work around it quite nicely, especially with the help of calculators and Microsoft Excel. I can even calculate percentages with Excel (something I really did have to do in my professional life), although not with a calculator. I’m not sure why that’s true, but it is. Before Excel, I had to ask people to do percentages for me.

I don’t believe I was born math-impaired. I blame the way math was taught in elementary school back in my day. We cave children would sit scratching page after page of the same rote math problem on our stone tablets, and there … is … nothing … more … mind … numbingly … boring than that. Working the problems was easy, but I would have rather watched paint dry than do it. By the time I was in third grade I was falling behind, and by fifth grade or so I had full-blown math phobia, and from then on I was hopeless.

On my PSATs I was in the 90-something percentiles in everything but math; in math I came in at 3rd percentile. Yes, that’s third, not thirty. I am not making this up. (As I remember I left most of the test blank because I was utterly baffled by it, but one of the few questions I did answer I actually got right. This must have saved me from first percentile.) In college I chose to major in journalism mostly because there wasn’t a math requirement.

I do consider it a disability, but if you’ve got to have a disability it’s a relatively benign one to have. I think that was Cohen’s point. He’s not opposed to math education. Nor am I; I am humbled and grateful that so many people can do math and are scientists and doctors and accountants and whatever. Civilization isn’t possible without them. But if you don’t have legs you’re not going to be a dancer. If you don’t have eyes you’re not going to be a graphic artist. I was never going to be a scientist. That’s how life is. I accept it.

Back to Kevin’s question — “if you find yourself completely unable to fathom algebra, should you be condemned to spend the rest of your life as a high school dropout?” My answer is emphatically no. But the real issue, IMO, is math education, and whether math is still being mis-taught. The Los Angeles Times story by Duke Helfand to which Cohen refers says that hundreds of Los Angeles high school students are dropping out without diplomas because of the algebra requirement. “The school district could have seen this coming if officials had looked at the huge numbers of high school students failing basic math,” writes Helfand. Teachers complain that they spend much of the class time reviewing math concepts students should have mastered in fourth grade. And 44 percent of Los Angeles high school students flunk algebra the first time they take it.

It is absolutely pointless to try to teach algebra to teenagers if they’ve had math phobias festering, untreated, since grade school. Fuhgeddaboutit. But in all these years have educators actually come to terms with math phobias, how they form, and how to treat them before it’s too late? Not that I’ve seen.

So instead of getting irritated with algebra invalids like Richard, Gabriela and me, go yell at educators. Dyscalculiaics are made, not born. Usually.

“Marginalizing” the Press

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Steven Thomma writes for Knight Ridder:

To many on the outside, it looked like a mistake when Vice President Dick Cheney failed to notify the White House press corps first of his shooting accident. But in the White House, it reflected a strategy of marginalizing the press.

More than ever, the Bush White House ignores traditional news media and presents its message through friendly alternatives, such as talk-show hosts Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. And when a reporter appears belligerent in a televised confrontation with the White House spokesman, as NBC’s David Gregory did this week, the imagery helps the administration turn the story into one about the press, which energizes a Republican base that hates the media anyway.

More than just a matter of sniping at an enemy, the Bush administration sees the traditional media as hostile. Working to erode their legitimacy in the public’s eyes is a critical element of its determination to weaken checks on its power.

Bush culties oblige. Like bratty children they throw tantrums at the press whenever it presents Dear Leader in a less than glowing light. Bush toady Thomas Sowell, who pretends to be some kind of journalist, actually wrote this:

There is nothing in the Constitution or the laws that says that the media have a right to be in the White House at all, much less to have press conferences.

Many world leaders have agreed with Sowell:

Sowell, who appears not to have two connecting brain cells anywhere in his head, begins his column “The first revolt of the American colonists against their British rulers was immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as ‘the shot heard round the world.'” Does Sowell believe colonists outside Massachusetts would have learned about Lexington and Concord were it not for independent colonial newspapers like the New England Courant and the Pennsylvania Gazette? I guess Sowell thinks King George would have issued a news release. He also says “The accidental shooting of Harry Whittington, while he was on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney, has nothing to do with government policy or the Vice President’s official duties.” Oddly, he held Bill Clinton to a different standard.

Thomma of Knight Ridder continues,

… more than any of its predecessors, Bush’s team has learned to deal with the media on the White House’s terms.

Cheney, for example, spoke about the shooting in an interview with Fox News, where hosts all week voiced sympathy for him and criticism for the press badgering him. (In fairness, Fox anchor Brit Hume posed many of the same questions that the White House press had asked – but only Hume got answers.)

Cheney also makes frequent appearances on talk radio, where he’s often fawned over. “We are thrilled and excited to have with us the vice president of the United States … for a precious few minutes,” Limbaugh said during one recent Cheney visit.

This week Limbaugh echoed the White House line, proclaiming: “This is not about Dick Cheney. It’s about the media.”

Thomma writes that Scott McClellan is not just stonewalling the press; he is baiting the press so they’ll play their assigned “bad guy” role for the camera.

At the start of a recent off-camera briefing, for example, White House spokesman Scott McClellan interrupted NBC’s Gregory when he asked about the shooting.

“David, hold on, the cameras aren’t on right now. You can do this later,” McClellan said. On camera later, Gregory appeared abrasive when McClellan stonewalled his questions. While reporters may think such exchanges show that the White House is unresponsive when the public has a right to know, White House aides know the TV imagery makes the press corps look petulant and appear more interested in posturing than in the public interest.

“McClellan is a brick wall disguised as a government official. He wins any time the press bangs its head against the wall,” NYU’s [Jay] Rosen said. “Part of the White House strategy is essentially cultural, that resentment against the press is itself converted into a political asset.”

If you are old enough to remember the Nixon Administration you’ll remember that Nixon and Agnew attempted to make the press their “bad guy,” too. As reporters dug deeper into Nixon’s Watergate and Agnew’s bribery scandals, Nixon apologists of the time complained the press was just picking on their guys because of “liberal bias.” That Nixon and Agnew might actually be guilty as sin doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds.

But Nixon and Agnew were amateurs at media manipulation compared to the Bushies. And Nixon and Agnew didn’t have Faux News, which for all intents and purposes is a propaganda arm of the White House disguised as “independent” news media. But some things don’t change. Like the right wingers of more than 30 years ago, today’s wingnuts are all-too-easily manipulated into betraying every value America ever stood for while calling themselves “patriots.”

Thomma continues,

.. Cheney found a ready audience when he suggested that the White House press corps was angry only because he’d left them out of the loop.

“I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them,” he said. “They didn’t like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times.”

Conservative bloggers echoed that line of attack, despite firm statements from loyal Republicans such as former Defense Department spokeswoman Torie Clarke and former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, who both said that Cheney had acted irresponsibly by not immediately disclosing to the nation that he’d shot someone.

Live TV broadcasts of news briefings also help the White House manipulate the media. Pundits, bloggers and talk-show hosts often spend more time criticizing reporters’ questions than the issues they’re raising. And reporters probing aggressively for information from polite but unresponsive officials can look like snarling jackals.

Jay Rosen of PressThink says the veep did not make a mistake by stonewalling media:

The way I look at it, Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain. Cheney does not grant legitimacy to the large news organizations with brand names who think of themselves as proxies for the public and its right to know. Nor does he think the press should know where he is, what he’s doing, or who he’s doing it with. …

… How does it hurt Bush if for three days this week reporters are pummeling Scott McClellan over the details of when they were informed about Cheney’s hunting accident? That’s three days this week they won’t be pummeling Scott McClellan over the details of this article from Foreign Affairs by Paul R. Pillar, the ex-CIA man who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year.

And we’ve also been distracted from the stonewalling of the NSA spy scandal, notice. Yesterday the Senate Intelligence Committee decided not to investigate the NSA “surveillance” program.

Some days I think that it’s going to take a miracle for this nation to survive the Bush Administration with democracy intact.

Hectoring Dimwits and Other Media Matters

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For an example of how Left and Right aren’t viewing the same reality, check out this post at rightie blog Radio Blogger. There is a transcript plus link to an MP3 file of an interview by Hugh Hewitt of reporter Helen Thomas, in which Hewitt shamelessly badgers the 85-year-old Thomas until she finally hangs up.

In Rightie World, this is called “winning an argument.” I call it “bullying.”

Several rightie bloggers are celebrating this travesty as if it proves something bad about news media. But all it proves is that Hugh Hewitt is a bullying, knee-jerking, Kool-Aid drinking Bush apologist who wouldn’t recognize professionalism or objectivity if it bit his butt.

See Tbogg for more on what is loosely called the Hewitt interview “style.”

Meanwhile, Peter Daou posts


A Challenge to Rightwing Bloggers Who Blame the Media for the Cheney Mess: Prove it.

Peter writes,

Despite the glaringly obvious fact that major media narratives favor the right, we get bloggers like this, this, and this attacking the “MSM” for hyping the Cheney hunting scandal. Rather than waste cyber-ink explaining why it’s a big deal that the Vice President of the United States shot a man in the face and heart and went to bed without letting the American people know about it, let me share a question I asked of a blogger at Real Clear Politics who questioned my premise about the pro-Bush press:

I know the assertion that [supposedly neutral or liberal] reporters favor rightwing narratives blows your mind; after all, the liberal media fiction is hard-wired into the right’s political nervous system. But why should I believe your foregone conclusion that these people are left-leaning? Just because you say it with such conviction? Give me concrete examples of bias, not of negative coverage. (How can there not be negative coverage of the mess in Iraq? Or Katrina? Or the Plame outing? Or the NSA fiasco? Or do you want our media to simply fawn over the government? Is anything less than total pro-Bush propaganda considered media bias?)

The thing is, righties can’t tell the difference between negative but factual coverage and bias. For righties, anything they don’t want to hear about their dear leaders is “biased.” Whether a report is true or not is just an insignificant quibble.

Update: See also Tristero at Hullabaloo.

Koufax Awards Update

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Your humble favorite blogger has been nominated in the “best writing” category. Voting for the finalists hasn’t begun yet, but I believe (a-HEM) I will mention it when it does begin.

Meanwhile — the folks at Wampum put in a lot of work on behalf of the liberal side of the blogosphere by hosting the Koufax Awards. They could use some donations to help pay for bandwidth. The tip jar is in the upper left column.

“It’s Kind of Freaky”

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This morning I really did plan to write about something other than Dick the Dick and his little accident, but Ronald Brownstein and Peter Wallsten have an article in today’s Los Angeles Times that make some excellent observations about what The Incident says about the Bush Administration’s governing “style.”

Observation #1: They are utterly flummoxed by unexpected events that weren’t part of The Plan.

Bush and his White House often seem to struggle when pressed to react to unexpected events, a difficulty highlighted Wednesday by the continuing furor over Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and a congressional committee’s sharply critical report about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

“There are maybe three or four things [Bush] really cares about, and on those things he will be clear, decisive and maybe even ruthless,” said Donald F. Kettl, an expert on government administration at the University of Pennsylvania.

But Bush and his aides “are not very good at … quick reaction, on-the-fly decision-making,” Kettl said. …

…From his initial campaign for Texas governor in 1994, Bush has excelled at establishing and adhering to long-term plans. He is rigorous about sustaining a message or limiting his legislative agenda to a few priorities. But that laser-like focus can sometimes leave the administration unable to quickly recognize the significance of events that don’t fit into their blueprint, critics say.

“That’s just not how they think,” said Ron Klain, a former Clinton administration aide.

“Not very good” is an understatement. This blogger has written many times about the Bushies’ pathological inability to respond to unexpected crises. This is from the December 28, 2004 Mahablog about his slowness to respond to the tsunami disaster:

This, of course, is just part of a pattern. After September 11 The Brat had to hide out on Air Force One for several hours before he could pull himself together (or sober up?) and act like a president. More than a year ago he had to be coaxed into addressing the nation after a particularly bloody day in Iraq (not as bloody as the days have been since, of course). And do you remember The Blackout of August 2003? I wrote at the time

    It took him four hours to bring himself to speak to the nation after the Blackout began, and then he could do so only on tape. (Drunk or stupid? We report — you decide.) After this week’s bombing that killed at least 20 UN workers, Bush’s keepers managed to get him off the golf course, into a suit and tie, and in front of cameras a bit faster. The keepers are learning, it seems.

Of course, he would have been a lot quicker if he’d been able to wear a quasi-military costume and prance around in front of a few thousand screaming groupies.

You can read more about the Boy’s slow response to the tsunami in this Washington Post article of December 29, 2004:

The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. … domestic criticism of Bush continued to rise. Skeptics said the initial aid sums — as well as Bush’s decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy — showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia. …

… Some foreign policy specialists said Bush’s actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. “When that many human beings die — at the hands of terrorists or nature — you’ve got to show that this matters to you, that you care,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. “It’s kind of freaky,” a senior career official said.

Last March, the White House was criticized for failing to express sympathy for the shootings on the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota.

And may I say … Katrina?

Brownstein and Wallsten draw parallels between Katrina and the veep’s utterly inappropriate non-response to his shooting of a hunting partner:

The Cheney shooting and the Katrina response have raised tough questions about what the president knows, when he knows it and how the White House shares information with elected officials and the public.

Which leads us to …

Observation #2: They can’t communicate with each other.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett rejected the suggestion that the two controversies [Katrina and The Shooting] pointed to communication failures among Bush and his aides. “That’s just over-interpreting,” he said.

Yet other observers, in both parties, maintained the incidents underscored concerns about Bush’s willingness and capacity to react to unanticipated challenges.

“If the buck stops with you, you are the person who has to take charge,” said Leon E. Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton. “I get the impression in this White House that the buck sometimes stops everywhere else but [with] the president…. Frankly, that mentality leads to nothing but trouble.”

Some senior Republicans, including top officials from previous GOP administrations, privately said they shared Panetta’s views.

One GOP fundraiser close to the White House said he thought the administration’s response to the news that Cheney had mistakenly shot a fellow hunter Saturday so closely replicated the Katrina experience that he wondered, “Is this a bad dream we are seeing again?”

“There is a pattern here,” said the fundraiser, who requested anonymity when discussing the administration’s workings.

Regarding the Saturday hunting incident, the White House account of who said what to whom, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told the President there had been a hunting accident at 7:30 pm Saturday, but Card had not learned that Cheney was the shooter. First, does anyone remember who told Card? I know he didn’t hear about the shooting from Cheney. Second, how weird is it that Card hadn’t bothered to ask who the shooter was? It was left to Karl Rove to inform Bush of this little detail, about 7:50 pm. It appears Karl learned what happened from ranch owner Katharine Armstrong, not through Bush Administration channels.

This is the same pattern we saw after Katrina, when White House staff tip-toed around in fear of telling the President the true dimensions of the unfolding catastrophe. Brownstein and Wallsten also remind us of the decision to invade Iraq:

But the question of whether the president receives a wide enough range of information has persisted for years — most notably in the administration’s conclusion before invading Iraq that leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In a little-noticed remark in November, national security adviser Stephen Hadley conceded that there might have been flaws in the information flow to the Oval Office, preventing Bush from hearing that many intelligence experts disagreed about Hussein’s arsenal.

“One of the things we’ve all learned from that is that it is important [to] … make sure that dissenting opinions also are given visibility,” Hadley told reporters.

Ya think?

The final observation:

Observation #3: Who’s in Charge?

Brownstein and Wallsten write,

The hunting imbroglio has sparked a related question about Bush’s management style: whether he has provided the vice president too much autonomy in an administration in which Cheney has wielded as much influence as any second in command. …

…The incident has also revived the debate about the degree of Cheney’s independence in the administration. Cheney’s office did not confirm the shooting until Sunday, after his host on the ranch, with his agreement, informed a local newspaper.

In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Cheney said White House communications officials encouraged him “to get the story out,” but deferred to him on how to release the story.

That follows the pattern established since Bush took office in 2001, said one former senior administration official who closely observed the relationship between the presidential and vice presidential staffs.

“The vice president’s office does indeed operate with a significant degree of autonomy,” said the former official, who requested anonymity when discussing internal White House relations. “Unless the vice president is helping the president to deliver a message [on policy], it is really the VP’s office that decides what they want to do when.”

This is from yesterday’s New York Times article by David Sanger:

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.

Sanger relates an incident in which the Vice President made a speech that stated a position contrary to the President’s decisions. Sanger writes, “it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.”

Bush can’t stand up to Cheney? So who’s in charge?

Back in 2000, when George W. choose Dick to be his running mate, there was much gushing in news media about the seasoned, experienced hand that would be guiding Bush in foreign policy. But as revealed in this 2003 article in Washington Monthly by Josh Marshall, “Vice Grip,” going way back Cheney’s judgments and opinions have been, um, kind of freaky. I urge you to read it, because it reveals much about the Cheney mindset — for example, this paragraph about the corporate-Washington-insider class of which Cheney is the insider’s insider:

In such a framework all information is controlled tightly by the principals, who have “maximum flexibility” to carry out the plan. Because success is measured by securing the deal rather than by, say, pleasing millions of customers, there’s no need to open up the decision-making process. To do so, in fact, is seen as governing by committee. If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them. But anyone who doesn’t agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.

That might work, except Cheney is more often wrong than right. Josh provides lots of examples. Worse, I strongly suspect Cheney is pathologically delusional. I wrote about this in the past; see “Moron, Idiot, or Nefarious Bastard?”

In sum, we a President who likes to prance around in flight suits and talk tough, but who can’t stand up to his father-figure Vice President. And the veep is a whackjob. Nice.

Dick Speaks

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I see that Deadeye Dick has finally taken responsibility for shooting Mr. Whittington. However, Joe Strupp and Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher report that The Dick is less than contrite.

Speaking on camera and disclosing some of the unaired footage, [Brit] Hume said Cheney was “utterly unapologetic” about the reporting lag but “a shaken man” in his interview. In comments on the cable channel just minutes after ending a 25-minute interview with Cheney, Hume described the encounter as revealing, but with little contrition on Cheney’s part.

“He didn’t blame anyone else, he blamed himself [for the shooting],” Hume told Fox’s Shepard Smith during a brief conversation. “But he didn’t take blame for the way it was handled…the White House press corps be damned.”

The veep admitted having one beer with lunch that day, but also said no one had any beer. See Think Progress for more about the amazing appearing and disappearing beer story. Other rumors for which I have no corroboration whatsoever involve women.

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.“