Russert seemed to play gotcha with Dean. Why shouldn’t Dems see double standards?: “WHERE ARE STANDARDS (PART 2)! Russert seemed to play gotcha with Dean. Why shouldn’t Dems see double standards?

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2003
EXTRA! CRANBERG SPEAKS! AGAIN! Kudos to the Post “Outlook” section for publishing Gilbert Cranberg’s piece on Colin Powell. We’ll have more on this topic by midweek. Of course, Colin Powell is King Untouchable; Cranberg’s report was completely ignored the first time it ran in a major paper (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/25/03). Maybe timorous pundits will even dare to ask Powell what happened this time.
RUSSERT PLAYS GOTCHA: Was Tim Russert trying to sandbag Dean with that question about the size of the military? Here at THE HOWLER, we can’t read minds, but it’s certainly hard not to wonder (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/27/03). Here’s the exchange from Meet the Press that ended with Dean, the Dem White House hopeful, displaying his woeful ignorance:
RUSSERT: Let’s talk about the military budget. How many men and women would you have on active duty?
DEAN: I can’t answer that question. And I don’t know what the answer is. I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq…
RUSSERT: But how many troops—how many men and women do we now have on active duty?
DEAN: I can’t tell you the answer to that either. It’s—
RUSSERT: But as commander in chief, you should know that!
Bingo! Russert got to lecture Dean about what he should know as commander in chief. (When Dean told Russert his question was silly, his host only lectured him more.) But take a look at that exchange, and tell us why Dems shouldn”

BTC News » John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up: “John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up
Filed under: Weldon’s Page Eat the Press— Weldon Berger @ 10:54 am
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Mark Halperin and John Harris, co-authors of The Way to Win, are participating this week in Slate’s “Breakfast Club” feature. Halperin is the political director at ABC News; Harris is his opposite number at the Washington Post. The “Breakfast Club” is a feature in which two or more luminaries in one field or another politely agree or disagree with one another on, with few exceptions, various irrelevancies. This week’s edition is mildly exceptional in that they’re discussing an issue of some import — the impact of the national political press on elections — and that Harris keeps telling Halperin, politely, to shut up about their book.
The reason Harris wants Halperin to shut up is that during the course of his promotion tour for the book, Halperin has courted right-wing talk and radio hosts and in so doing has disintegrated into a 10-year-old boy begging the bullies to like him. Glenn Greenwald has the awful details of Halperin’s behavior with right-wing talker Hugh Hewitt — the worst example to date, but not the only — which Billmon likens to the desperate self-criticism sessions common in Soviet Russia and vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It isn’t just Halperin’s character or his ability to provide rational coverage of politics in this country that his courtship of Hewitt, and Sean Hannity before, calls into question: it’s his mental acuity. At one point he tells Hewitt that “I am beginning to think you are intellectually dishonest on a few points.” He is, mind you, writing to a man whose very trade is intellectual dishonesty”

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Buffalo News – Many U.S. arms given to Iraq are listed as missing

mparent7777: The Bob Woodward version: “The Bob Woodward version

Sidney Blumenthal

18 – 10 – 2006

The tangled story of investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s relationship with the Bush administration reveals the White House’s subtle entrapment of his form of reportage, says Sidney Blumenthal.

As soon as President Bush finished the first-year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina he turned to the fifth-year anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in order to restore his faltering popularity and set the themes for the Republican Party in the campaign for the mid-term elections on 7 November 2006.
Through a series of speeches he proclaimed that he would ‘stay the course’ in Iraq, which he conflated with his war on terror. Polls, after all, showed that his standing on Iraq was sliding while his standing on terror was steady. His effort to merge one into the other, as he had done since before the invasion, was an act of political alchemy. Speaking at a Republican fundraiser on 28 September, he proclaimed: ‘The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.’
But on 5 October, an unimpressed Senator John Warner, Republican chairman of the armed services committee, declared that Iraq was ‘drifting sideways,’ and that if Bush’s policy was to continue it was time to ‘change the course.’
On 8 October, James A Baker III, the former secretary of state, a close associate of the elder Bush and now the chairman of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group that will report its recommendations in early 2007 to the president, declared his support for Senator Warner’s call to ‘change the course’ – ‘Yes, absolutely. And we’re taking a look at other alternatives.’
On 10 October, a New York Times/CBS News poll reported, according to the NYT”

Crooks and Liars: “Last night Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens discussed Iraq, Bush and Kerry’s joke with Paula Zahn on The Situation Room. Following a short exchange between Paula and Christopher, in which Christopher was upset being referred to as a conservative, the conversation turned very interesting and Bush ended up being lampooned by the end of it.
Video – WMV Video – QT
Sullivan: ‘Iraq is the foreign policy version of Katrina. This President can not handle the reality anymore.’
It is a scary day when you got Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens appearing together and they both are blasting Bush, while defending Kerry. Sullivan has become more of an outspoken critic of the Bush administration (as well as the Republican Party as a whole) lately, but Hitchens now seems like he is really changing his position on everything.”

Once Upon a Time…: The Nightmare Continues: From Central America to Iraq: “October 23, 2006
The Nightmare Continues: From Central America to Iraq
From Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily:

Death squads from the Ministry of Interior posing as Iraqi police are killing more people than ever in the capital, emerging evidence shows.

The death toll is high — in all 1,536 bodies were brought to the Baghdad morgue in September. The health ministry announced last month that it will build two new morgues in Baghdad to take their capacity to 250 bodies a day.

Many fear a government hand in more killings to come. The U.S. military has revealed that the 8th Iraqi Police Unit was responsible for the Oct. 1 kidnapping of 26 Sunni food factory workers in the Amil quarter in southwest Baghdad. The bodies of ten of them were later found in Abu Chir neighbourhood in the capital.

…

General Dulaimi has been trying for long to expose the organised criminal gangs that have been controlling the ministry since its formation — a formation that was overseen by U.S. authorities.

Dulaimi says he does not believe that the Shia Badr organisation, a large, well-armed and funded militia, has complete control over his ministry. But most residents of Baghdad believe that Badr has complete control over the Baghd”

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Crooks and Liars: “Emailer Doug: Rush Limbaugh today accused Michael J. Fox, actor and Parkinson’s Disease victim, of deliberately going off of his meds to appear on camera with exaggerated symptoms of his disease for dramatic effect. Fox appeared in a recent Clair McHaskill (D-MO) Senate campaign ad, touting the need for stem cell research. Limbaugh even goes so far as to accuse Fox of faking his symptoms all together.

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