Digby tells Peggy Noonan it's time to apologize.

UPDATE: Leah A., who also needs her own blog, says:

Yes indeed, the mighty Wurlitzer was on the job on this one, and it wasn't just the usual idiots. So august a conservative as Christopher Caldwell, you know, the good conservative whom TAPPED is always TAPPING on the back for his excellent writing and excellent fairness, was right in there, banging out dissonance; that's my polite word for LIES.

Even more than Noonan, who contented herself with using the good, though mis-guided Wellstone to club the mourning family and friends left behind, Caldwell implicated Wellstone himself in all the badness going on; it was emblematic, don't you know, of who Wellstone really was at heart, which Caldwell knew for sure, using that lazar eye all conservatives come equipped with that can penetrate through flesh and bone to see the real person; his unique discover - Wellstone was a phony, though a phony who didn't know he was a phony.

For instance, Caldwell claimed, there was no interest at the memoria in any of the people who died with Paul, the eulogies were only about the Senator. As Wellstone had lived, Caldwell pointed out, so had he died; after all, Wellstone's constituency was limited to left-leaning college professors (I swear to God that's what Caldwell wrote)

One problem with this analysis; as we all know, there was a long separate eulogy for each of the passengers who died in that plane. For heaven's sake, two of them were Sheila Wellstone, Paul's wife, and Marsha, his daughter. Was Caldwell trying to say Wellstone, his family and friends didn't care about them either?

Of course he wasn't. The truth is that Caldwell isn't much better than any of the contemporary right, and every bit as prone to lie. Clearly, he hadn't seen five minutes of the memorial, or made any attempt to read any accounts from neutral sources, or made any attempt to contact anyone actually there, or anyone responsible for putting on the memorial. Why bother with tiresome, and potentially troublesome facts when you are in possession of the truth, by definition. Oh sure, Caldwell's up for the occassional attack on an Anne Coulter; she's a genuine embarrassment. The question I have for Caldwell: jeepers creepers, why aren't you embarrassed by Peggy Noonan? Hell's bells, why aren't you embarrassed by yourself?

Someone, (digby, atrios) should do the same kind of job on Caldwell on the memorial that digby did so beautifully today on Noonan. Please.

(um, I think you just did)

Orange County, CA isn't quite what people think it is.

It can produce Bob Dornan, Pejman Pundit, Ann Salisbury, and CalPundit.

My Plea For the New Year

Partisan hacks should admit to being partisan hacks.


I am one!

So, cut the crap the rest of you.

The Twins Cruise Report

My best friend's son was on this cruise. He's a huge Bush fan but was extremely disappointed in the conduct of the twins. He said that all they did was drink. He met Jeb's son George and thought he was just terrific. I guess the family mingled like normal folk though surrounded by Secret Service.

They're legal now, so good for them!

Cheers!

I'm sure Mrs. Atrios would be the first to tell Jeff Jarvis that I lack the necessary beauty that telegenic pundits such as Robert Novak and Jonah Goldberg possess. I have a feeling Josh Marshall could be okay, as long as we get the scruffy unshaven pissed off looking Josh Marshall from the website and not the rather frustratingly supine (and too well groomed) Josh Marshall we see when he pays that toad Howie Kurtz a visit.

As for radio, Mike Malloy is very good at what he does. Randi Rhodes and Nancy Skinner are also quite good. Malloy doesn't quite have TV down yet, though Nancy is pretty good.

Anyway, the point is there is some talent out there - in media and in existing organizations. It just needs coordination, cultivation, and above all financial support.

The Right has numerous transmitters - people who can sidestep the "mainstream media" and blast stories, talking points, and information out to a mass audience and ensure the rest of the media will dutifully parrot it. And, of course, Fox News as well. The Left doesn't have this at all. This is where Bloggers may play a role. But, even then - if a tree falls in a forest... until the media takes its cues from liberal bloggers, as it currently does from conservative ones to some degree, we can't be very optimistic about the power of our Blogs.

Damn. Digby has a blog - now where am I going to get all my best stuff?

Ailes notes the Mugger is an idiot.

Now I'm pissed. Google demoted me. I used to be "7/10" on their page rank system, now I'm back down to "6/10."

Conason's good today.

In comments below Reynolds says:



Actually, Josh and I emailed about this almost the minute it was posted. He wanted to be sure I realized he was quoting someone. I said yes, but your post says they're right. And I offered to change the post if he thought I was unfair.

He said no, but I nonetheless added a line making clear that he was quoting someone.

If I've learned anything, it's that people who call me a "conservative asshole" generally don't bring much to the argument.



To which I respond:


Nor do people who say that people who are against war in Iraq are objectively pro-Hussein.

In any case, agreeing with what he quoted in which a comparison was made between the situations at Ruby Ridge and North Korea is not the same thing as stating (or meaning) that there is a moral equivalence between Ruby Ridge and North Korea. But,you know that.

This inspires confidence.

dd LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) -- A Pakistani jeweler said Wednesday his picture is among those of five suspects who the FBI says may have entered the United States on falsified passports. The man said he has never visited the United States.

Though it is amusing sometimes in the end I find any discussion of "Who is Atrios?"* rather silly - at least silly if people actually care. I mean, who is Ted Barlow? Well, he's some guy from Texas who has a weblog. Who is Oliver Willis? Some guy in Boston who runs a weblog. Who am I? Some guy in Philadelphia who runs a weblog. If this were "Eschaton, by Bob Smith" people would say "oh, that Bob Smith is some guy in Philadelphia who runs a weblog." End of story.

Being anonymous raises the question of whether I am "somebody" - which I think means somebody in politics or media outside of this weblog. And, I've said many times I'm not. I've never worked in journalism in any way (well, okay I was briefly an intern in high school for a tiny local rag...) and I've never been involved in politics. I don't receive secret messages from the DNC or Sid Blumenthal (though I'm open to it!) nor, sadly, do I receive any money. But, even if you knew my name you wouldn't have any idea if that last claim were true, any more than you know whether Glenn Reynolds is paid by Grover Norquist.



*Deliberate stupid Ayn Rand reference

Speaking of Gene Lyons

Here's today's column. Arkansas readers aren't allowed to read unless you get the paper, so close your eyes:

The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk

Everybody remembers the slapstick scene at the end where Bill Clinton's pants fell down. But now that it's receeding into history, it'd be surprising to find one American in ten who can recall exactly what Kenneth Starr's ballyhooed Whitewater investigation was alleged to be all about. It simply defies credibility that the United States government frittered away $60 million and squandered the energies of upwards of 100 FBI agents for seven years investigating a failed $200,000 dirt road real estate project before admitting it found no credible evidence of wrongdoing by President Clinton or his wife Hillary.

According to Susan McDougal's engrossing, often funny new book The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk, she did her best to warn Starr's investigators that they'd embarked on a fool's errand. She describes a March, 1995, meeting during which OIC prosecutors made it clear that all she needed to do to secure a grant of immunity was to drop a dime on the President.The problem was, she kept telling them, that "I didn't know of anything the Clintons had done that was even remotely illegal."

She remembers thinking "what a dumb system...there was no obvious way to prevent a guilty person from simply telling grandiose lies against another person - one who might well be innocent - in order to save his own skin."

Unfortunately, the whole system turns upon the competence and integrity of prosecutors, and the abstemious Mr. Starr turned out not to have any. It still drives her crazy that "despite abundant evidence to the contrary, [Starr] is almost always described as an honest man, indeed as a man of real integrity." She speculates that her pious antagonist got the benefit of the doubt from the press simply "because he was so quick to assure us over and over or his reputation for honesty. Whether comparing himself to Joe Friday or quoting scripture, Starr made sure to constantly talk about his integrity....[But] the simple truth is that Kenneth Starr had absolutely no compunctions about telling outright lies if they suited his purposes."

True to her generous nature, McDougal doesn't quite grasp how deeply the Washington press establishment had bought into the Whitewater delusion, nor how willing it was to abandon its own ethical standards in the quest to bring down a Democratic president. Shoot, she's still upset that lazy journalists bought into the premise that "Madison Guaranty [Savings & Loan] was a criminal enterprise," smearing many innocent, hardworking employees, although virtually all of the real crimes Starr's team found centered around their star witness, embezzler David Hale.

She ought to read Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf's book Truth at Any Cost. They blame the entire state. In darkest Arkansas, see, Starr "was up against an infernal system...everything seemed geared to protect the former governor and his wife - from the local courts and prosecutor's offices to the federal judiciary." Infernal, no less, which my dictionary defines as "of or relating to hell."

Schmidt glorified Starr for the Washington Post; Weisskopf for Time. Having staked their careers on OIC leaks, their book is the journalistic equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages come to identify with their captors. But they did get one thing half right: "Exhibit A" in their explanation of why Starr failed to bring indictments against the Clinton "crime family," for example, is Susan McDougal. "Clinton," the authors contend "would not ask her to break her silence. She never talked."

In reality, of course, Susan did testify for several days during her 1999 criminal contempt trial, and was cross-examined by OIC prosecutors more than a year before Truth at Any Cost was published. Her account of that trial, and the deep satisfaction it gave her to confront Starr's bully boy prosecutors in open court, as opposed to a grand jury room where prosecutors have virtually unlimited power, makes a satisfying conclusion to a deeply humane account of one woman's unlikely heroism.

But it was, indeed, McDougal's dignity and courage that brought Starr's operation to a standstill. She served 18 months in jail on a civil contempt citation imposed by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright because she refused to testify before a federal grand jury.

Starr's attempt to add criminal contempt charges failed when the trial jury deadlocked in favor of acquittal and a mistrial was declared. The jury found her innocent of an obstruction of justice charge, apparently because she convinced jurors of what she'd realized three years earlier when, after convicting her of crimes she insists they knew she hadn't committed, OIC prosecutors paraded her in chains before a national TV audience: They had never been interested in the truth, only in getting the Clintons.

Maybe exhibiting her like Hannibal Lecter wasn't the dumbest thing Starr ever did. He did so many dumb things. But in retrospect, the image of Susan McDougal in her simple checked skirt and black stockings, draped in shackles and shuffling off to prison with her chin held high, told millions of Americans all they needed to know about the prissy Torquemada who ordered it done.

You can buy Susan's book here.

Flashback Wednesday

This leads to a larger and even more disturbing question: How much of the Times' coverage of the various Clinton scandals, from Whitewater on down, can be trusted? The answer: not very much.

It's time to unmask. Two years ago I wrote a book called "Fools For Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater," based on a lengthy article I had originally written for Harper's magazine. The chief antagonists in the book, it's fair to say, are the aforementioned Labaton and Gerth.

"From its dimmest origins in Times reporter Jeff Gerth's March 8, 1992, article about the Clintons' ill-fated land deal," I wrote in the book, "the Whitewater 'scandal' has worked as follows: Tipped off by an interested party, a reporter, editorial writer, columnist or Republican politician conceives a theory of what must have happened in a given set of circumstances -- most often circumstances altered by ignorance or suppression of inconvenient facts. The theory gets stated as a rhetorical question: Did the Clintons do X, Y, or Z? Next, it is an insinuation: it sure looks as if they must have done it. Then, a conclusion: of course they did it, the cunning rascals. Eventually, theory metamorphoses into pseudo-fact: they did it. All without anything remotely resembling proof having been offered. When evidence to the contrary comes along, it's shoved aside, minimized or suppressed, a whole new theory is created, and the entire press pack goes whooping off down yet another trail. If they were rabbit dogs, you'd have them gelded as house pets.

"To the practiced eye, the Times coverage of Whitewater has followed this pattern with almost comic regularity."

One example each of the Gerth and Labaton method should suffice. The implied misdeed in Gerth's original 1992 Whitewater story was that Gov. Clinton had schemed with his handpicked state securities commissioner, a woman named Beverly Bassett Schaffer, to keep his crooked business partner James McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan from being shut down by regulators despite its insolvency, thus resulting in millions of dollars in losses to taxpayers. "In interviews," Gerth wrote in the Times, "Mrs. Schaffer, now a Fayetteville lawyer, said she did not remember the Federal examination of Madison ... 'I never gave anybody special treatment,' she said."

About as guilty-sounding a non-denial denial as one could hope to find, wouldn't you say? The trouble is, Gerth's characterization of Bassett Schaffer's faulty memory couldn't have been more misleading. Far from forgetting, Bassett Schaffer had in fact written Gerth a series of highly detailed memos, 20 pages in all, informing him of the following facts: The state of Arkansas had no plenary authority to shut the S&L down without the permission of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which it never got. Second, on Dec. 10, 1987, more than a year after joining with federal regulators in ousting McDougal from control of the Madison Guaranty, Bassett Schaffer had sent a registered letter to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the FSLIC strenuously urging that the institution be closed immediately. Fifteen months later, the Bush administration finally got around to shutting Madison Guaranty down.

Bassett Schaffer not only hadn't dragged her feet, she had goaded reluctant federal regulators to take action. Testimony at subsequent Senate Whitewater hearings would ultimately show that of all 746 institutions that went belly up during the S&L crisis of the 1980s, not a single one anywhere in the United States was shut down by state regulators alone -- a fact the New York Times has never, to my knowledge, reported.

Stunned by Gerth's selective account, Bassett Schaffer considered filing a libel suit against the Times, but eventually decided it was a no-win situation. Meanwhile she had amassed considerable legal fees and given up her own law practice to deal with Whitewater full time. She has never been charged with wrongdoing of any kind.

There, now we can all hate the New York Times.


Buy Gene's totally ignored book here.

(no I am not Gene Lyons)

Autoerotic asphyxiation burn?

Well, just a theory, but somebody could ASK.

UPDATE: Another possible theory. And here.

Hey, uh, Horse? It's '03..

Is it just me, or was there surprisingly little of the usual "year in review" stuff this year?

Minty-Fresh Testoster-Grease Makes You Happy

...after 10 men received an eight-week course of testosterone gel, they reported significantly
improved mood, less anxiety, better sleep, and heartier appetites ...

and really powerful glutes.

Hey, um, guys, my email address is...

With that sentiment, there is a sense within the leadership ranks that the party erred in not building a media support system after the 2000 presidential election, when it lost the media coordination of the Clinton White House.

"Across the board, we need to muscle up," said John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton and now a law professor at Georgetown University. "That means from the Congressional operations to the party committees to the think-tank world to, most significantly, beefing up our capacity to communicate with the public in all forms of media, not just through obscure Internet Web sites but on television and radio."

Whuh?

"BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, Dec. 31 -- U.S. military authorities announced today that a brief shootout erupted between U.S. and Pakistani troops along the Afghan border Sunday, prompting the U.S. forces to call in an F-16 warplane that dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Pakistanis to end the clash."


U.S. and Pakistani military authorities sought to play down the clash and stressed that both sides remain determined to cooperate in hunting down remnants of Taliban and al Qaeda forces who have redoubts in the isolated border hills and move back and forth across a tense and loosely policed frontier. But the shooting raised again the question of whether some Pakistani soldiers and tribal leaders still sympathize with their Taliban neighbors, whom they long supported until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.