U.S. military plays up role of Zarqawi
Jordanian painted as foreign threat to Iraq’s stability

By Thomas E. Ricks

The Washington Post

Updated: 6:39 a.m. ET April 10, 2006
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

Running argument
There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

‘No attempt to manipulate the press’
"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."

The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

‘Villainize Zarqawi’
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq — though he said in an interview the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them.

Kimmitt said, "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."

A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program. "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts.

Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people of al-Anbar — Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically — have decided to turn against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Harry Taylor blasts Bush Harry Taylor blasts Bush  Taylor was at the North Carolina event today and said he's never felt more ashamed of the leadership of his country.                                            Video-WMP Video-QT soon Taylor: Okay, I don't have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate…And I would hope — I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself… I'm wondering how "FOX News-I mean the Secret Service" let him in? Full transcript

Journalist, Heal Thyself

LA Times Media critic David Shaw claims in today's paper that bloggers don't deserve the reporter's privilege because they are lazy, careless and inaccurate. In the process of explaining why, he makes a couple of whopping mistakes that one can only assume he makes because he is lazy and careless. (subscription only, sorry):

It isn't easy to define what a journalist is — or isn't. Forty or 50 years ago, some might have dismissed IF Stone as the print equivalent of a blogger, writing and puhlishing his muckraking 'I.F. Stone Weekly." But Stone was an experienced journalist, and his Weekly did not traffic in gossip or rumor. He was so highly regarded by his peers that he was widely known as "the conscience of investigative journalism."

Bloggers require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even important diofferences between bloggers and journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part on an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.

When I or virtually any other journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column for example.

[…]

If I'm careless — if I am guilty of what the courts call a "reckless disregard for the truth" — The Times could be sued for libel … and could lose a lot of money. With that thought — as well as out own personal and progessional copmmittments to accuracy and fairness — very much much in mind, I and my editors all try hard to be sure that what appears in ther paper is just that, accurate and fair.

[…]

Many bloggers — not all, perhaps or even most — don't seem to worry much about being accurate. or fair. They just want to get their opinions — and their scoops — our there as fast as they pop into their brains.

[…]

But the knowledge that you can correct errors quickly,combined with the absence of editors or filters, encourages laziness, carelessness and inaccuracy, and I don't think the reporter's privilege to maintain confidential sources should be granted to such practitioners of what is at best psuedo-journalism.

[…]

Certainly, some bloggers practice what anyone would consider "journalism" in its roughest form — they provide news. And just as surely, bloggers deserve credit for, among other things, being the first to discredit Dan Rather's use of documents of dubious origin and legitimacy to accuse President Bush of having received special treatment in the National Guard.

But bloggers alos took the lead in circulating speculation that what appeared to be a bulge beneath Bush's jacket during his first debate with Sen John Kerry might have been some kind of transmission device to enable advisors to feed him answers.

No credible evidence has emerged to support such a charge.

In the first case, the Columbia Journalism Review did a thorough debunking of the blogging "journalism" in the Dan Rather case.

And there is ample evidence from real gen-u-wine accurate 'n fair jernlists that the NY Times pursued the Bush bulge story, was ready to run with it and killed it as it drew too close to the election. A NASA scientist came forward with sophisticated imaging to prove it (as Salon magazine reported at the time.) The Times' science editor Andrew Rivkin, who contributed the bulk of the reporting, had told [ombudsman]Okrent that the scientist’s assertions “did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. … He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line." Certainly, the bizarre denials by the white house — that it was "bad tailoring" should have made any legitimate journalist question what was going on. This was not just idle blogging gossip.

So, in his scathing article about blogging malfeasance and inaccuracy, David Shaw missed the mark in both of his examples.

I'm only sorry that you can't link to the whole story. If there has ever been a better example of self-righteous elitism from a total fuck-up, I've never seen it. Mr Shaw makes quite the fool of himself.

Update: Here's a link to the entire article.
.
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Blog-Gate

Yes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair

By Corey Pein

“The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive ‘Freeper’ (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicion of fraud. From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.”
— Chris Weinkopf in The American Enterprise Online

“The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60 Minutes II] down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.”
— Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal

“NOTE to old media scum . . . . We are just getting warmed up!”
— “Rrrod,” on FreeRepublic.com

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that’s mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a story about how George W. Bush got preferential treatment as he glided through his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was anchored on four memos that, it turns out, were of unknown origin. By the time you read this, the independent commission hired by the network to examine the affair may have released its report, and heads may be rolling. Dan Rather and company stand accused of undue haste, carelessness, excessive credulity, and, in some minds, partisanship, in what has become known as “Memogate.”

But CBS’s critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian’s name was on them. We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don’t know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes. Who really wrote them? Theories abound: The Kerry campaign created the documents. CBS’s source forged them. Karl Rove planted them. They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents. The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source. We know less about this story than we think we do, and less than we printed, broadcast, and posted.

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

What efforts did CBS make to track down the original source? What warnings did CBS’s own experts provide to 60 Minutes II before air time? These are matters for the independent commission, headed by Lou Boccardi, former chief of The Associated Press, and Dick Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general. But meanwhile, the dangerous impatience in the way the rest of the press handled this journalistic tale bears examination, too.

‘IT ISN'T JUST RUSH LIMBAUGH. . .’
Three types of evidence were used to debate the documents’ authenticity after Rather and 60 Minutes II used them in the story. The first, typography, took many detours before winding up at inconclusive. The second, military terminology, is more telling but also not final. The third, the recollections of those involved, is most promising, but so far woefully underreported.

Haste explains the rapid spread of thinly supported theories and flawed critiques, which moved from partisan blogs to the nation’s television sets. For example, the morning after CBS’s September 8 report, the conservative blog Little Green Footballs posted a do-it-yourself experiment that supposedly proved that the documents were produced on a computer. On September 11, a self-proclaimed typography expert, Joseph Newcomer, copied the experiment, and posted the results on his personal Web site. Little Green Footballs delighted in the “authoritative and definitive” validation, and posted a link to Newcomer’s report on September 12. Two days later, Newcomer — who was “100 percent” certain that the memos were forged — figured high in a Washington Post report. The Post’s mention of Newcomer came up that night on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, and on September 15, he was a guest on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes.

Newcomer gave the press what it wanted: a definite answer. The problem is, his proof turns out to be far less than that. Newcomer’s résumé — boasting a Ph.D. in computer science and a role in creating electronic typesetting — seemed impressive. His conclusions came out quickly, and were bold bordering on hyperbolic. The accompanying analysis was long and technical, discouraging close examination. Still, his method was simple to replicate, and the results were easy to understand:

Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes . . . to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the ‘authentic’ document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible.

Red flags wave here, or should have. Newcomer begins with the presumption that the documents are forgeries, and as evidence submits that he can create a very similar document on his computer. This proves nothing — you could make a replica of almost any document using Word. Yet Newcomer’s aggressive conclusion is based on this logical error.

Many of the typographic critiques were similarly flawed. Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.) Other blogs quickly picked up the charges. One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as the day after the report, September 9. The goal, said president Greg Mueller, was to create a buzz online while at the same time showing journalists “it isn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising questions.”

In order to understand “Memogate,” you need to understand “Haileygate.” David Hailey, a Ph.D. who teaches tech writing at Utah State University — not a professional document examiner, but a former Army illustrator — studied the CBS memos. His typographic analysis found that, contrary to widespread assumptions, the document may have been typed. (He points out, meanwhile, that because the documents are typed does not necessarily mean they are genuine.) Someone found a draft of his work on a publicly accessible university Web site, and it wound up on a conservative blog, Wizbang. The blog, citing “evidence” that it had misinterpreted, called Hailey a “liar, fraud, and charlatan.” Soon Hailey’s e-mail box was flooded. Anonymous callers demanded his dismissal.

Hailey is more restrained in his comments than other document examiners more widely quoted in the press. Of course, cautious voices tend to be quieter than confident ones.

Hailey wasn’t the only one to feel the business end of a blog-mob. The head of one CBS affiliate said he received 5,000 e-mail complaints after the 60 Minutes II story, only 300 of which were from his viewing area.

The specific points of contention about the memos are too numerous to go into here. One, the raised “th” character appearing in the documents, became emblematic of the scandal, as Internet analysts contended that typewriters at the time of the memo could not produce that character. But they could, in fact, according to multiple sources. Some of the CBS critics contend they couldn’t produce the specific “th” seen in the CBS documents. But none other than Bobby Hodges, who was Colonel Killian’s Guard supervisor, thinks otherwise. He told CJR, “The typewriter can do that little ‘th,’ sure it can.” He added, “I didn’t think they were forged because of the typewriter, spacing, or signature. The only reason is because of the verbiage.”

Hodges’s doubts about the memo rest mainly on military terminology, and he has a list of twenty-one things wrong with the terms used in the CBS documents. He says he came up with the first ten in a couple of minutes. For example, he points to the use of “OETR” instead of “OER” (for Officer Effectiveness Report), and the use of the word “billets” instead of “positions.” This helped close the case for some, but probably shouldn’t have. Even preliminary digging casts some doubt on the evidence. For example, Bill Burkett was quoted in a book published last March using the term “OER,” suggesting he would’ve known better had he forged the documents as Hodges and others implied in interviews. And newspaper stories and Air Guard documents indicate that the term “billets” was indeed used in the Air Guard, at least in the mid-1980s. Such small points don’t prove anything about the memos. But they do suggest that the press should never accept as gospel the first explanation that comes along.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD
As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard. Still, there was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined.

The Killian memos seem to have grown out of battles that began long before last September. In early 2004, Burkett had featured prominently in a book, Bush’s War for Reelection, by the Texas journalist Jim Moore, who also co-wrote the Karl Rove biography Bush’s Brain. Bush’s War for Reelection included a story dating back to 1997, when Burkett worked as an adviser to the head of the Texas National Guard at Camp Mabry. In that role, Burkett says, he witnessed a plan to scrub George W. Bush’s file of embarrassments.

When this came out, the press naturally turned to the people Burkett had named in Moore’s book. And those men — Danny James, Joe Allbaugh, John Scribner, and George Conn — all dismissed Burkett’s story. That’s four against one, but not necessarily case closed. Most reporters omitted some basic, and relevant, biographic facts about Burkett’s critics.

For example, Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts — in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few — as Bush’s old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described “heavy” of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, “There isn’t anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.” He was made head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Bush’s victory, resigned in 2003, and went on to head New Bridge Strategies, a firm that helps corporations land contracts in Iraq.

Danny James, a Vietnam veteran and the son of “Chappie” James, America’s first black four-star general, is also a political appointee whose fortunes rose with Bush’s. He had his own reason to dislike Burkett. Burkett’s 2002 lawsuit in a Texas district court against the Guard claimed that the staff of then adjutant-general James retaliated against him for refusing to falsify reports. It was dismissed, like other complaints against James and the Guard, not on the merits, but because under Texas law the courts considered such complaints internal military matters. Without further investigation, we are stuck at he said, she said.

Many of the people defending Bush in February on the scrubbing story appeared again in September, when the alleged Killian documents appeared on CBS. Other defenders appeared as well, and rarely were their connections to the Bush camp made clear, or the basis for their claims probed.

Other pieces of context might have been helpful, too. For example, Maurice Udell, the former commander of the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, in which Bush served, first came to Bush’s defense in 2000 and was resurrected for the same cause in 2004. After Memogate he was a guest on Hannity & Colmes and was quoted in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, saying the memos were “so totally false they were ridiculous.” He also popped up in The Richmond Times-Dispatch and an Associated Press story. No one noted the cloudy circumstances of Udell’s exit from the military (probably because the relevant clips are hard to find in electronic databases). In 1985, after an Air Force investigation into contract fraud, as well as misuse of base resources, Udell was ordered to resign. The initial probe included an allegation of illegal arms shipment to Honduras, but the charge came up dry.

Context was also lacking in quotes from Bush’s old National Guard roommate, Dean Roome, who appeared with this old boss Udell on Hannity & Colmes. With one exception, Roome’s press appearances have served a singular purpose: praise the president, attack the memos. The exception was notable and often reprinted. Last February, USA Today used a quote from a 2002 interview with Roome: “Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life.” Roome says the comment was taken out of context, and emphasizes how great it was to fly with Bush.

In his office, Roome had taped up a printout of a September 16 Washington Times story in which the reporter asked Roome to speculate about who “the forger” was. Roome does not name Burkett but hints that it was he, without offering specifics. Roome also has a framed picture of President Bush signed, “to my friend Dean Roome, with best wishes.” Another picture shows Roome and Bush on a couch. Roome says it’s from this past March, when he attended a private party in Houston with Bush and about a dozen old friends. The meeting, Roome said, was a back-slapping affair, in which Bush told the group how he cherished his old friends from the Guard, Midland, and Dallas.

When the central charge is a cover-up, as it was in the CBS story, vigilance is required. Thus, the connections between Bush’s old associates should have seen print. Together the men formed a feedback loop, referring reporters to one another and promoting a version of events in which Bush’s service is unquestionable, even exemplary. With such big names and old grudges in play, journalists are obliged to keep digging.

The Memogate melee peaked in late September. On cable, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC held forth with hasty overstatements: “I’m supposed to say ‘allegedly forged.’ I think everybody in America knows these documents were forged.” His guests threw in anything that sounded good: “You know, Dan Rather’s being called on the Internet, ‘Queen of the Space Unicorns,’” said Bob Kohn, author of a book on why The New York Times “can no longer be trusted.” (The “Space Unicorn” line had first appeared on Jim Treacher’s conservative humor blog, and quickly wound up on The Wall Street Journal’s online opinion page.)

Conclusions were often hidden within questions, no matter how little evidence supported them. NBC’s Ann Curry, hosting the Today show, asked a guest, who had no way of knowing: “Was CBS a pawn in a dirty tricks effort by the Kerry campaign to smear . . . President Bush? Can we go that far?”

No, we can’t. But by the time Dan Rather announced on November 23 that he would step down from the anchor spot in March 2005, the bloggers’ perceptions had taken hold. For example, the December 6 issue of Newsweek stated, incorrectly, that Rather had acknowledged that the 60 Minutes II report “was based on false documents.” The following week the magazine’s “Clarification” was limited to what Rather had said, not to what Newsweek or anyone else could have known about the documents.

Dan Rather trusted his producer; his producer trusted her source. And her source? Who knows. To many, Burkett destroyed his own credibility when he told Dan Rather that he had lied about the source of the Killian memos. Still, many suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign. While Burkett doesn’t like the president, many people in America share that opinion, and the sentiment doesn’t make him a forger.

Jim Moore, who relied on Burkett for much of his book on Bush, says he initially called some of the generals who worked with Burkett to check his source’s reputation — but didn’t tell them what the story was about. They all said Burkett was honest and trustworthy. When Moore called them back, and described the accusations, only one of them, Danny James, then changed his opinion, calling Burkett a liar. George Conn, the ex-Guardsman who said he didn’t remember Burkett’s story of file-scrubbing, nevertheless told reporters Burkett was “honest and forthright.”

Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff has said that he interviewed Burkett last February and thought Burkett “sounded credible,” but didn’t use the Texan’s story because he couldn’t substantiate it. Good decision. CBS couldn’t prove the authenticity of the documents in its story, and look at the results. Dan Rather has announced his resignation under a cloud and his aggressive news division is tarnished. And the coverage of Memogate effectively killed the story of Bush’s Guard years. Those who kept asking questions found themselves counted among the journalistic fringe.

While 2004 brought many stories of greater public import than how George W. Bush spent the Vietnam War, the year brought few of greater consequence for the media than the coverage of Memogate. When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalism’s authority was weakened. But it didn’t have to be that way.

Domenech appears to have copied three new pieces

By Chase Johnson & Andy Zahn
Flat Hat Variety Editor & News Editor

Former Washingtonpost.com blogger Ben Domenech wrote 35 articles for The Flat Hat while he was a student at the College. There are 10 articles that are similar to pieces by other authors, including three new instances discovered by The Flat Hat.

Several sections of Domenech's Oct. 22, 1999 review of the film "Fight Club" were similar to Andrew O'Hehir's Oct. 15 review of the same film on Salon.com.

Domenech writes, "Brad Pitt, a violently charismatic mack-daddy whose gospel includes such maxims as 'You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis.'"

O'Hehir writes, "Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a dissolute, mack-daddy hipster whose gospel includes such maxims as 'You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis.'"

Later Domenech writes, "Pitt spouts Cliffs Notes versions of Hemingway and Neitzsche about self-destruction and the physical body, flavors his conversation with coy homoeroticism …"

This is similar to O'Hehir's review.

"Tyler Durden's wisdom is mostly tossed-off Cliffs Notes Hemingway and Neitzsche maxims about self-destruction and the physical body, flavored with a coy homoerotic wink," O'Hehir writes.

Later, Domenech writes "[t]here isn't a lot more to tell about the Norton-Pitt-Carter triangle without giving away 'Fight Club's' bizarre secrets …"

O'Hehir writes, "[t]here isn't a lot more I can tell you about the narrator-Tyler-Marla triangle without giving away this tangled and far-too-long movie's secrets."

Domenech's Jan. 21, 2000 review of the film "Magnolia" contained several sections that were similar to Todd Anthony's Jan. 6, 2000 review of the same film in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Domenech writes, "Cruise quickly eradicates any lingering aftertaste from his last performance in Stanley Kubrick's depressing 'Eyes Wide Shut,' strutting across the screen as the inwardly tormented leader of 'seduce and destroy' seminars designed to teach lonely men 'how to make that lady friend your sex-starved servant.'"

Anthony writes, "Cruise eradicates any unpleasant aftertaste lingering from his involvement in Stanley Kubrick's disappointing 'Eyes Wide Shut' last summer. Cruise struts … as the inwardly tormented leader of 'seduce and destroy' seminars designed to teach lonely men 'how to make that lady 'friend' your sex-starved servant.'"

Later, Domenech writes, "Robards' attempts to settle accounts parallel to those of a popular game show host (Philip Baker Hall). At least the latter man knows how to get in touch with his offspring, but his cocaine-addled daughter (Melora Walters) spurns his 12th hour attempt to patch up their differences." The only difference between these two pieces is that Anthony uses "child" rather than "offspring."

Domenech also writes in his review about "a wealthy bedridden cancer patient and TV game show magnate who long ago cheated on and abandoned his terminally ill wife." This is identical to Anthony's review of "a wealthy bedridden cancer patient and TV game show magnate who long ago cheated on and abandoned his terminally ill wife."

The Flat Hat also found three passages in Domenech's Oct. 27, 2000 column that appear to be copied from two columns written by Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review.

In the first passage, Domenech uses the phrase "warped as road rash on velvet," which is similar to Goldberg's Sept. 20, 2000 column "These Things I Know" on National Review Online, in which he writes "'gay as road rash on velvet' doesn't actually make sense but it sounds pretty damn funny to me."

Later in the column, Domenech writes, "'Sporting his mature Jon Bon Jovi haircut and his even-sensitive-souls-can-have-big-pecs black ribbed T-shirt, Kashner exudes an air of jock-poet ennui – 'Not only have I read Proust, but I can also kick your ass.''"

In Goldberg's May 13, 1999 edition of "Goldberg File," he writes, "Sporting his mature Jon Bon Jovi haircut and his even-sensitive-souls can have big pecs black T-shirt, he's reading a slender volume of poetry with convenient big print. He keeps looking at me with an air of jock-poet ennui – 'Not only have I read Proust, but I can also kick your ass.'"

Finally, Domenech writes, "I'd be banned from the debates like a leper at the Playboy mansion," which is similar to Goldberg's Sept. 20 column, which says, "the Hotline bans me from its pages like a leper at the Playboy mansion." Domenech does not credit Goldberg in any portion of his column.

A catalog of Ben Domenech's articles with The Flat Hat is available here in pdf form.

Online note: Please use the following url to reference this article:
http://flathat.wm.edu/story.php?issue=2006-03-24&type=1&aid=25

Abramoff "hearts" Delay-Redux Abramoff "hearts" Delay-Redux Blast from the Past -originally posted 1/10/06 Any talking heads doubting whether "Gekko Jack" and the Hammer are pals should just watch this circle jerk introduction by Abramoff at the 2002,  College Republican Conference. Jack: Never before  has an individual who has been steadfast to our principles-risen as high as Tom Delay. Jack: Tom Delay is who all of us want to be when we grow up.                                                   Video-WMP Video-QT What principles are those Jack? Using Terri' Schiavo's ravaged body as a political tool, or maybe the Island of Saipan affair that Brian Ross revealed on 20/20? (Al Franken's book has a chapter dedicated to this) Are these the high moral principles that all those impressionable "College Republicans" should aspire towards.

Bush's Strong Arm Can Club Allies Too
Lawmakers, Activists Say Tactics for Enforcing Loyalty Are Tough and Sometimes VindictiveBy Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A06

Editor's note: This article was withheld from later editions of yesterday's paper to accommodate coverage of the start of the war in Iraq.

After a Newsweek cover story in 1987 titled "Bush Battles the Wimp Factor," the label stuck to George H.W. Bush for years. Now, his son is creating the opposite perception: the Bully Factor.

As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as "arrogant bully" (Britain), "bully boys" (Australia), "big bully" (Russia), "bully Bush" (Kenya), "arrogant" (Turkey) and "capricious" (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of "hardball" tactics, "jungle justice" and acting "like thugs."

At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance — even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush's policy wishes.

Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.

In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush's views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration — sometimes on groups' donors — to conform to Bush's policy views and even to fire dissenters.

Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush's dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its "friends" in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.

Under such pressure from the administration, lobbyists and lawmakers who voiced doubts about Bush's economic policies have publicly reversed themselves. "I think I should have kept my mouth shut," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in one such recantation last month.

The forms of pressure — exclusions from White House guest lists, a loss of access to key Bush aides, calls to dissenters' superiors, veiled threats saying the White House has noted the transgression or even shouted accusations — convey the same message. Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who enforces loyalty for the White House, puts it this way: "If I bitch, guess what? I get coal in my socks."

The technique has served the Bush White House well by maintaining the lockstep support among Republicans needed to pass Bush policies in a closely divided Congress. "It's fascinating the extent to which this administration has been able to hold troops in line for an extended period of time," said Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution.

But on the latest round of tax cuts, there are signs of a backlash against Bush's tough tactics. In Congress, a group of moderate GOP senators and representatives said they would only support a tax cut much smaller than Bush's. And lawmakers suggest that resentment is growing beneath the surface.

More than a dozen members of Congress interviewed for this article said support for Bush's economic plan is weaker than the public might realize because lawmakers don't want to challenge the president publicly. "We don't want to stick it in the president's eye — at the moment," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). He said as many as 20 House Republicans oppose Bush's tax cuts, and an additional 40 or 50 are uneasy about the details and timing.

The White House says its style is vigorous but not strong-armed. "The president believes strongly in issues and he diligently pursues what he believes in on the basis of policy, and that's why he's won so many votes — because members agree with him," press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

But GOP lawmakers have other reasons for their support. "People have come to realize that it is better to be seen helping the administration than pulling down parts of his plan," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.). Foley knows the consequences. He opposed Bush on a free-trade vote despite intense pressure. So when Bush senior adviser Karl Rove recently encouraged Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel R. Martinez to run for the Senate from Florida — the same seat Foley is seeking — many on Capitol Hill suspected it was Bush's revenge on Foley. Foley, in an interview, said he was worried he might get the "Pawlenty" treatment, a reference to last year's Minnesota Senate race, in which the Bush White House pushed out Tim Pawlenty, the GOP majority leader in the Minnesota House, to clear the way for handpicked candidate Norm Coleman.

Some of the White House's tactics have become lore. After Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) opposed Bush's first tax cut, White House slights and threats to cut his pet programs drove Jeffords from the GOP. Last year, after Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) voiced concern about Bush's immigration policy, Rove told him to never again "darken the door" of the White House.

But the hardball tactics are deeper and more pervasive.

Eager to send a message to the National Governors Association to reflect a GOP majority, the White House for the first time excluded Raymond C. Scheppach, the NGA's executive director, from the governors' annual dinner at the White House last month. Encouraged by the administration and its allies, a few Republican governors — including the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — threatened to stop dues payments or quit the group. After a bipartisan NGA committee drafted a statement seeking more federal money for the states, the White House let its displeasure be known to the governors, and Republicans arrived at the meeting last month demanding the rejection of the "partisan" statement.

Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for "liberal-leaning Republicans," the group's president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend's one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth's chairman and a major contributor, to protest.

"I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy," Moore said. "It's dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It's shortsighted." Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. "They want sycophants rather than allies," said the head of one think tank.

Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the "K Street Project," top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.

In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. "There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don't play ball on almost every issue that comes up," Dooley said.

Staff writer Dan Balz contributed to this report.

Re: Box Turtle Ben ‘Apologizes’ for King Comment (Score: 1) by BlackSheepOne (hays2sarah2@yahoo.com) on Thursday, March 23 @ 18:30:31 CST (User Info | Send a Message)

Here, guys, the way to fix this idjit is to ignore it. If WaPo wants to publicly pay a troll that’s their lookout. He brags about the hits he gets in the E&P piece. Let ‘im die alone in a room reeking of cat wee.

[ Reply to This ]
 

New ‘Wash Post’ Blogger: OK, Coretta King Was Not a Communist, My Bad

By E&P Staff

Published: March 23, 2006 5:30 PM ET

NEW YORK For the past two days, as E&P observed yesterday, the world has learned more about Ben Domenech than it, and surely he, thought it ever needed to know, thanks to the detective work of liberal bloggers. The creator of the new, and already controversial, Washington Post conservative blog, Red America, has already been targeted for dismissal by two liberal activist groups, MoveOn.org and Media Matters for America. Conservatives have hailed the Post’s hire.

Among the allegations is that he posted a number of inflammatory statements under the name “Augustine” at the site he co-founded, RedState.org. In one of them, he called fellow Post blogger Dan Froomkin “an embarrassment” and “leader of the hack.” In a posting at his new Washington Post blog this afternoon, he admitted that he was, indeed, Augustine, and apologized for calling Coretta Scott King a “Communist” on the day after her recent funeral.

Here is the post:

“Two clarifications for the many folks who have risen up in force to attack the existence of this blog (I appreciate the attention, by the way).

“Some people have taken issue with an old two-line comment of mine on RedState.com where I referred to Coretta Scott King as a Communist on the day after her funeral. Coretta Scott King was many things, and her most significant contribution was the unflagging support of her husband in his own noble work to bring equality to all Americans.

“She was also a liberal activist on a number of issues, including same-sex marriage and abortion. The thread where my comment appeared discussed President Bush’s attendance at Mrs. King’s funeral, which was criticized by some for its political nature. My comment questioned the president’s decision to attend the funeral after he had phoned in a message to the March for Life, the largest pro-life rally and a significant annual event. Mrs. King participated in many different political causes, some of which involved associations with questionable people, but referring to her as a Communist was a mistake, hyperbole in the context of a larger debate about President Bush’s political priorities. Mea Culpa.”

In regards to another old post where I referenced something written by Father Richard John Neuhaus regarding the book “Freakonomics”, I suggest that people actually take the time to read what is said. Neuhaus is setting up in blunt terms the logical consequences of the argument made in “Freakonomics” that hey, abortion may be icky, but at least it deters crime by eliminating people who may become criminals — in this case, minority children in urban areas.

Neuhaus, one of the most outspoken, respected and influential pro-life intellectuals in America, finds this logic as morally disgusting as I do. He is putting this logic in its bluntest terms to show the full degree of its inhumanity. A few people have noticed this, but for those who are still having trouble, I highly recommend this.

Now, back to your regular dose of Red America.

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Posted at 01:07 PM ET, 03/22/2006
Attempted Child Murder on our Side of the Pond
It’s not just Washington bureaucrats like the folks at FEMA who won’t take responsibility when something goes wrong: According to reports today out of Massachusetts, no one agency or group is going to take responsibility for the case of young Haleigh Poutre.

As you may recall, Haleigh is the young girl who was nearly put to death by a group of doctors who maintained she was “virtually brain dead” and in a “permanent vegetative state” (PVS) before, well, she wasn’t. ProLifeBlogs describes the case in detail, as does Michelle Malkin.

The case creates a difficult situation for Massachusetts Governor (and 2008 hopeful) Mitt Romney in his efforts to reach out to pro-life conservatives and evangelicals.

And while the report of the panel he commissioned to study the issue tags the state and private health providers for “a systemic failure,” it does nothing significant to alleviate the use of PVS and its use as a justification to euthanize a patient. You’d think you were reading a FEMA report for how much the panel glosses over individual responsibility.

This isn’t an issue that can be smoothed over, and no one is served by giving bureaucrats and medical authorities a pass for such an egregious error. For the sake of future Haleighs, and for the sake of Romney’s electoral future, it’s worth the effort to make sure that a new system is adopted.

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Posted at 11:07 AM ET, 03/22/2006
Sackcloth and Ashes: What’s Wrong With Infanticide?
[Note: Sackcloth and ashes were a sign of deep mourning, among other things, in the Torah…nowadays, there are plenty of reasons to bring them back. When we run across those reasons, we’ll feature them in a continuing series, of which this is the first installment.]

“You have to remember parents have a bond with their children that doctors and nurses cannot have. It is vital they feel they remain in control.” That’s a comment in the Coventry Evening Telegraph by one Anita Macaulay about the judge’s decision in the controversial family law case that ought to serve as one of the ever-growing number of signs of the apocalypse (along with the popularity, of course, of Ryan Seacrest).

In brief: A group of British doctors fought in court for the right to remove a fully-conscious little boy from a ventilator, over the objections of his parents, because they judged his quality of life to not be worth living. There’s more here about the case.

The boy, referred to only as MB in court papers, is conscious and awake. His parents want his ventilation to be continued. But they had to fight to do so over the objections of the doctors, who argue that it would be in MB’s “best interests” to be taken off of his ventilator.

(Please note: it is the official blog advice of Red America that if your own physician ever tells you that it’s in your “best interest” to hurry up and die, you ought to at least get a second opinion.)

…continue >>
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Posted at 08:14 AM ET, 03/22/2006
Comments About Comments
A few notes are in order after the impressive reaction to the premiere of this blog.

First off, a note of thanks to the liberal side of washingtonpost.com’s readership, which has weighed in on Red America in this comment thread. I’m happy that no one’s engaged in any ridiculous hyperbole, unfounded accusations or unintentionally hilarious name-calling. We can all agree that such things lower the quality of debate on the Internet, play to the worst side of our knee-jerk partisan nature and have no place in the modern public square. I look forward to engaging you in a serious, respectful discussion on the issues that matter most to the future of our nation.

To that last point, we’ll be rolling out comments here shortly. Because this is an opinion blog, and not a work of unbiased journalism, it is sure to spark responses from a few fringe members of this Internet political community, who might be motivated to deluge comment systems with offtopic concerns (or perhaps go after other members of the Washington Post family, who have nothing to do with this blog – silly, I know, but I’m told it happens). Comments will be coming after the initial launch is finished, when I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of posting and you, gracious readers, have gotten used to it, too.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting worthwhile reader reactions from the comment thread mentioned above and from email. It’s great to be part of the washingtonpost.com Opinions section, and I hope this column
proves to be an interesting and worthwhile read for all of you.

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Posted at 01:14 PM ET, 03/21/2006
Whiny? Crazy? You Just Might Be A Conservative
You know that one loud, whiny kid in the supermarket yesterday? He’s probably the future George W. Bush, according to a Toronto Star article about a study from the Journal of Research Into Personality.

“Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative,” says the article. “At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.”

This story goes on to mention another study by John T. Jost of Stanford, one in 2003 that was roundly mocked by conservatives for lumping the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan and Limbaugh together as socially warped right-wingers. (Much of the mocking turned to anger when it was discovered that $1.2 million in taxpayer dollars helped pay for the study.) Whiny, socially warped, borderline insane – if that’s true of conservative kids, how do red states ever find good public school teachers?

Of course, we should never question social psychologists in their line of work. They are, after all, professionals. So the idea that perhaps a small number of kids from the Berkeley area may not be a truly representative slice of the American population is just silly. Professor Jack Block, the author of the study, defends his work by explaining to the Star that “within his sample….the results hold.” Surely, his statistics professor is very proud.

Meanwhile, as the academy tells us that social ineptness, insanity, and insecurity can all be motivations for conservatism, the MSM doesn’t want us to forget the other side of the scale: hence, Ruth Marcus’s column in today’s Washington Post. Marcus maintains that the real problem with George W. Bush is that he’s too focused on being a manly man’s man.

Apparently, this violent testosterone-fueled psychological imperitive – not a coherent and just strategy for defending America in response to the first major attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor – is the real reason for our war in Iraq. Oh, and Condi Rice? Don’t worry, women can have manly envy, too. Clearly, Maggie Thatcher did.

If these columnists and scientists are to be believed, then President Bush is just a real-life version of Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper – blustering, impotent and murmuring about conspiracies to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, just another spineless conservative wussyboy who has to prove he’s a big brave man in cowboy boots.

This is ridiculous and wrong. It’s always better to just let kids be kids and keep the psychologists out of the way – to follow the dictum of an aging hippie couple I know who, despite their pacifist beliefs, still let their boys run around playing army with sticks made into guns. After all, someone has to defend America.

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Posted at 07:00 AM ET, 03/21/2006
Pachyderms in the Mist: Red America and the MSM
This is a blog for the majority of Americans.

Since the election of 1992, the extreme political left has fought a losing battle. Their views on the economy, marriage, abortion, guns, the death penalty, health care, welfare, taxes, and a dozen other major domestic policy issues have been exposed as unpopular, unmarketable and unquestioned losers at the ballot box.

Democrats who have won major elections since 1992 have, with very few exceptions, been the ones who distanced themselves from the shrieking denizens of their increasingly extreme base, soft-pedaled their positions on divisive issues and adopted the rhetoric and positions of the right — pro-free market, pro-business, pro-faith, tough on crime and strongly in favor of family values.

Yet even in a climate where Republicans hold command of every branch of government, and advocate views shared by a majority of voters, the mainstream media continues to treat red state Americans as pachyderms in the mist – an alien and off-kilter group of suburbanite churchgoers about which little is known, and whose natural habitat is a discomforting place for even the most hardened reporter from the New York Times.

During the discussions about the launch of this new blog, the good folks at washingtonpost.com spent far too much time in sessions with markers and whiteboard, trying to settle on a name for the column. The suggestions were all over the map – but one suggestion provided a reminder of the sociopolitical divide in this country. “What about ‘Red Dawn’?” said one helpful editor.

“Well, only if you want to make people think it was a gun blog,” I said, to puzzled faces.

“Red Dawn? You must know it – the greatest pro-gun movie ever? I mean, they actually show the jackbooted communist thugs prying the guns from cold dead hands.”

Any red-blooded American conservative, even those who hold a dim view of Patrick Swayze’s acting “talent,” knows a Red Dawn reference. For all the talk of left wing cultural political correctness, the right has such things, too (DO shop at Wal-Mart, DON’T buy gas from Citgo). But in the progressive halls of the mainstream media, such things prompt little or no recognition. For the MSM, Dan Rather is just another TV anchor, France is just another country and Red Dawn is just another cheesy throwaway Sunday afternoon movie.

While the mainstream media has been slow to recognize the growth in conservative America, smart Democrats have not. Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton are not alone in recognizing that the unhinged elements of their base, motivated by partisan rage, Michael Moore conspiracies and a pronounced feeling of victimhood have dragged down the Democratic Party for far too long. It’s a political anchor apotheosized by the founders of leftist websites Daily Kos and MyDD, whose recently published book on political strategy and the Internet (an odd publication when one considers that DKos endorsed candidates are 0-19 in elections) opens with the sentence “Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means.” Smart Democrats read this kind of rhetoric and recognize that if they continue to be the party of Howard Dean, the floor may be nonexistent.

The reason there are political openings for these neo-triangulation strategies, however, is almost entirely the fault of Republican leadership. On issue after issue, Republicans have given in to the wisdom of the MSM and the beltway talking heads instead of listening to their constituents and the conservative political base. On the size of government, on immigration and on issues of federal power, Republicans have adopted the same Washington strategies that doomed the Democrats in the 1994 cycle, as this article yesterday illustrates. They’ve grown fat and happy on pork contracts, and forgotten why they were sent to this town in the first place.

Even President Bush is guilty of this – would a White House that put principle before patronization, listened to its base, and remained focused on election season ever make the gargantuan mistake of nominating Harriet Miers? Of course not – and smart Democrats are determined to use this split to their advantage.

Red America’s citizens are the political majority. They’re here to stay. It’s time to start paying attention to what they believe and why.

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---

E&P Staff

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester

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The End of the Internet?

by JEFF CHESTER

[posted online on February 1, 2006]

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation’s communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet’s future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet’s future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

 

THIMEROSAL

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Saturday, June 18, 2005 4:47 PM UPDATE—– Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News Vice President for Media Relations called me yesterday, clearly annoyed about the controversy surrounding Thursday’s sudden pulling of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s story/interview package about Thimerosal slated for Good Morning America, 20/20, and a 3 minute piece on that evening’s World News Tonight. He said the idea that an executive on the “WEST Coast”- his phrase not mine-had the story yanked was ridiculous. He said that he suspected who the source was that gave the kill-story to The Huffington Post and that it was vendetta-driven. He was amused and a bit surprised , he said, that one web posting had created such a commotion. By mid-afternoon, the original story on The Huffington Post had vanished from Google News and replaced with a strong re-affirmation and claim that their source has “first-hand knowledge” of the situation. This was simply a story’s script that the producer took a look at before airing and said ” I want more” Mr. Schneider explained. I was finally able to get ahold of Mr. Kennedy about 20 minutes ago, just as he was getting off a plane, so I will update here when more details become available. Suffice it to say, after what Don Imus went through with the complete SMEARJOB in The Wall Street Journal, after daring to discuss Thimerosal poisoning, I’m starting to get the creeps…. JT