David S. Broder (1929-2011)

Is it always required that we fib about the departed?

It's not dancing on the man's grave exactly, but it seems important not to enshroud the dearly departed in blankets of lies.

by Ken

Washington Post political writer Dan Balz writes on the paper's website, presumably for tomorrow's edition: "David Broder was the best political reporter of his or any other generation."

Um, no, Dan. Maybe at the start a case could have been made that he was somebody to watch. But for the bulk of his dreadful career, he only placed in the top million political reporters because so many of the others were so god-awful. And of course since he became a journalistic icon, generations of up-and-comers have followed in the footsteps of his god-awfulness, that smarmy voice of oracular Village conformity.

Come to think of it, it's kind of alarming to hear this kind of folderol coming from a writer currently making his way up the ladder of the Post's political team. Dan Balz started there as someone worth watching. Is he telling us that his goal is to be totally Broderized? Goodness, that's depressing.

I don't take any great pleasure in stomping on the departed, but I really abhor the common practice of lying about them. David Broder was an outsize symbol of one of the crucial things that's wrong with American political life -- the media being in on the overlords' fix -- and had himself acquired enough cachet that he was more than a symbol: He was a vital force in the mediocritization, conventionalization, and stupidification of the controlling media elite. Any writer who aspires to covering American politics might do well to post his picture on their wall with the legend: "DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU."

An immensely useful corrective to the Broder hagiographizing (I don't know if there was such a word, but there is now) is the extraordinary speech Michael Moore made the other day in Wisconsin, "America Is NOT Broke," which Howie offered in both video and printed-text form in a post called "WE HAVE HAD IT! America's Financial Coup d'état."

Here's the video again:



If you haven't watched or read this remarkable speech, this would be a good time to do so -- or to rewatch or reread it. Just as a tease, or reminder, let me recall, first, how Michael began:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

And then how he concluded:

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them!

AND THEN FOR FURTHER READING . . .

"It's one thing for a nation to be downwardly mobile during a recession. It's quite another to be downwardly mobile during a recovery -- but that looks to be precisely what's happening."

Continue with Harold Meyerson's WaPo column today, "Where's the economic recovery?" You have to wonder how long the Post will continue to tolerate its few opinion-mongers who remain in steady contact with reality -- Meyerson, and E. J. Dionner Jr., and Gene Robinson, and . . . and . . . surely I must be leaving someone out. It's hard to keep track amid the growing gaggle of right-wing geese, made possible in large part by the mealy-mouthed Broderized "centrists" who've done so much to enable the rise of the right-wing media noise blockade.

I'm not sure you can afford to not read any of Meyerson's column, but let me offer this nugget as a tease:

We didn't arrive at this predicament accidentally. Since the early 1980s, when General Electric's widely admired chief executive, Jack Welch, declared that the primary goal of the corporation was to increase shareholder value, America's corporate managers have been faithfully rewarded for treating their employees as necessary - or unnecessary - evils, to be shed whenever possible, or replaced by foreign or temporary workers, and most certainly not allowed to form unions or receive wage increases. Thirty years later, this form of shareholder capitalism has swept the field of nearly all opposition, with results - chiefly, the eclipse of the decent-paying job - that grow more glaring with each passing day.

There's a lot more to be said on the subject, and we'll try to cover some of it in the days and weeks to come.

In good part there's so much to be said on the subject because David Broder and the people who admire and imitate him have so successfully kept this whole subject off the journalistic table.

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Streams Of Consciousness

Someone at the DCCC told me they hire the same media consultants to make their ads-- and steer hapless candidates to those firms as well-- not because DCCC employees have ownership stakes in them but because they make the best ads anyone has ever made. Problem is that objectively, their ads are-- at best-- mediocre. They don't motivate people to vote for a candidate. They're just a giant money suck-- with millions and millions of dollars in commissions and rake-offs for the usual suspects. A recent U.S. Senate candidate told me today that he begged the DSCC not to waste money on more useless TV ads when he desperately needed the money for a GOTV operation. They ignored him; he lost. Above is a well-made ad that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It's done professionally, not by some clowns more concerned with 15% commissions than with winning elections.

Who's Hack Of The Year?

If David Broder is the 4th worst hack, I'm at a loss to imagine who numbers 3, 2 and 1 are. I know Jonah Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, Laura Ingraham and Marty Peretz already got their numbers but did George Will already get one? Do Palin's twitter and Facebook ramblings make her eligible?

He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself. He defines extremism as principled adherence to any sort of ideology. When he wants to understand what The Voters are thinking, he asks a think tank academic. Despite his disdain for the fiery populists that the idiot voters repeatedly send to our sadly broken Congress, he remains convinced that The American People are a wise and noble breed who long for sensible, bipartisan moderation in all things.

And then sometimes David just up and writes something truly insane, like his recent column about how President Obama needs to start a good old-fashioned war to get the economy humming again.

What Do Doctors Know?

I don't have much faith in what Republican politicians routinely call the "best health care in the world." They're good at broken bones and stopping bleeding. Beyond that... it gets dicey. And a study released today in the New England Journal of Medicine, says that efforts to make American hospitals safer over the past decade have largely failed. I always get the feeling that going to a hospital is a possible death sentence.
Researchers found that of 2,300 patient admissions in 10 randomly selected hospitals 588 patients "were somehow harmed as a result of medical procedures, medications, or other related causes... [and that] 63 percent of the incidents were avoidable."

"Of 588 harms that were identified, 245 (41.7%) were temporary harms requiring intervention… and 251 (42.7%) were temporary harms requiring initial or prolonged hospitalization," Landrigan and his colleagues wrote. "An additional 17 harms (2.9%) were permanent, 50 (8.5%) were life-threatening, and 14 (2.4%) caused or contributed to a patient's death."

...The results of the study show that "harm resulting from medical care was common" and that there is "little evidence that the rate of harm had decreased substantially" from 2001 to 2007, the researchers said in their report. They added that their findings "validate concern raised by patient-safety experts in the United States and Europe that harm resulting from medical care remains very common."

Republicans Aren't That Unique

In fact, they're just like Conservatives in the U.K.-- same bunch of piggish social parasites.

David Cameron was under pressure tonight to evict a new Tory peer from the party after he suggested that welfare changes would encourage "breeding" among the less well-off.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats denounced the "shameful" remarks by Howard Flight, who was rewarded with a peerage by the prime minister last week after helping to raise millions for the Conservative party in the runup to the election.

Downing Street was forced to distance itself from a second Tory peer in a week after Flight warned that plans to remove child benefit from higher-rate taxpayers would deter the middle classes from having children.

His remarks followed the claim last week by a former Thatcherite cabinet minister that most people were better off in the recession. Lord Young of Graffham was forced to resign as Cameron's enterprise adviser after suggesting that most voters had never had it so good as during the "so-called recession."

Flight told today's London Evening Standard: "We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive... But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible."

This is the second time Flight, a former Tory deputy chairman, has fallen foul of the party leadership. He was barred from standing as a parliamentary candidate by Michael Howard in 2005 after suggesting that Tory spending cuts did not go far enough.

And this post can only end one way, my favorite campaign commercial of 2010:

Streams of Consciousness

Disclaimer: I've never been a David Broder fan and his OMG! What happened! column in today's Washington Post doesn't make me anymore sympathetic to him. He comes across as some kind of a 1930's Weimar conservative who thought Hitler could be easily contained and guided by the adults. If he ever had any, Broder has long lost any kinds of sharp or worthwhile insights. He seems bewildered that the Miss McConnell and the resurgent congressional Republicans are not showing any signs of "willingness to compromise." Who'd a thunk?

And what seems to be really tearing the old hack apart is that the extremists he helped ascend to power aren't paying any attention to his Republican Establishment heroes, Henry Kissinger, James Baker III and Brent Snowcroft in the little matter of bipartisan foreign policy. I guess the red t-shirts psychopaths like Allen West (R-FL), Rand Paul (R-KY), Tom Marino (R-PA), Daniel Webster (R-FL), Lou Barletta (R-PA), Mike Lee (R-UT), Raul Labrador (R-ID), Tim Griffin (R-AR), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sandy Adams (R-FL), Renee Ellmers (R-NC), Tim Walberg (R-MI), Vicky Hartzler (MO), Allen Nunnelee (R-MS), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Ron Johnson (R-WI) were wearing confused people like him into thinking they were seeing Teddy Roosevelts, Dwight Eisenhowers and Bob Doles instead of Adolph Eichmenn, Joseph Goebbelses und Heinrich Himmlers. Broder worries that the Republicans are "feeling their oats and will be hard to deal with."

A central goal of American foreign policy under both Republican and Democratic administrations has been securing our ability to monitor and limit Russian missile development.

Intrusive examination of Russian facilities ended with the expiration last December of the START treaty negotiated by President George W. Bush. A follow-on agreement, reducing the number of missiles on both sides and guaranteeing the inspections will continue, was negotiated and signed by Obama and the Russians this year.

Obama has urged publicly and privately that the Senate ratify the treaty in the lame-duck session, rather than letting the unmonitored period extend into some point next year, when the new Senate may or may not get around to it.

At a White House event last week, his call for action was endorsed by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James A. Baker III and by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

But those three, representing the Republican foreign policy establishment of the past two administrations, are being countermanded by Jon Kyl, the senator from Arizona who is No. 2 to McConnell in the Senate.

McConnell has made it clear that he backs his partner in delaying the treaty, forcing Obama to seek at least nine Republican votes despite the opposition of the GOP leadership.

It is notable that McConnell bases his opposition on the claim that the Senate schedule does not allow sufficient time for debate on the treaty. That is normally a judgment that would be made by the majority leader, Harry Reid, who backs the president in calling for action by the lame-duck session.

It is typical of these Republicans to usurp that role, even if they did not reach their goal of claiming a Senate majority in the midterm elections.

Typical? Really? Funny how he never hinted at that during the election campaign.

Maybe Obama Just Mastered How To Do Well On Tests Or Something

Someone who was much more prescient than Broder during the campaign was Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and professor who isn't considered as "serious" as the demented and dull WaPo drudge in the Village. It looks like he's pretty much giving up on Obama; how is there any way not to?

Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling-- because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation-- but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying:

We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the 1933 inauguration-- which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn’t take place until March-- Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear.

More and more, it’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

Like Sharron Angle, Gingrich Will Only Participate In Debates If He Approves Of The Moderator

That lets out real journalists. On C-Span's Washington Journal this morning, the Beltway's biggest crybaby forswore being part of any debates that included Keith Olberman and or Chris Matthews. He didn't mention Rachel Maddow but maybe he mixed up Matthews and Maddow; he must have. In any case, I'm guessing most, if not all, of the Republicans planning on running only want softball questions from the Fox cocoon and will settle for nothing more than Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Chris Wallace, Bill O'Reilly... right-wing propagandists and hacks only.

“There's no possibility that I would ever go to a debate and have Olbermann or Chris Matthews asking questions," declared the money-grubbing faker from Georgia... I watched the debate a couple of years ago and it was an embarrassment because they were so relentlessly hostile and they were so left-wing that every question they asked of the Republicans was designed to embarrass and divide the Republicans. And every question they asked the Democrats was designed to make them look good. Well, why would we participate in that?”

This was in his mind, something that never actually happened in the real world, a world Gingrich doesn't inhabit anyway. There were no debates that either Olbermann, Matthews-- or for that matter, Maddow-- participated in that pitted Democrats and Republicans in 2008. But when has objective reality ever stopped Newt Gingrich? Jimmy Carter has a very different perspective on what fair and balanced is than Gingrich. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Souces the former president said aloud what everyone already knows but is seldom voiced on TV-- that “The talk shows with Glenn Beck and others on Fox News, I think, have deliberately distorted the news." He went on to draw the false equivalency by comparing them to MSNBC.

And speaking of Fox, Texas closet case Rick Perry was on Fox News Sunday this morning pushing the 1937 GOP line that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme.

"What I'm saying is that between Social Security, Medicaid and Medicaid there's $106 trillion of unfunded liabilities and not one dime saved to pay for them," Perry said on Fox News Sunday. "My children who are in their 20s know that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme." 

When challenged by host Chris Wallace, who pointed out that when Social Security started there were seven or eight workers for every retiree, Perry doubled down on his criticism by arguing the program would even shame Charles Ponzi, who inspired the term by paying returns to early investors using money from later investors.

"It probably is a program that even makes Mr. Ponzi feel pretty bad if he was still alive. The fact is our children know that the money that they're putting into Medicaid they'll never see," Perry said.

"And it is a Ponzi scheme. I don't know how you would explain it any other way than what you just did. There are fewer people paying into it and our kids are never going to see any benefit from it. Fix it and fix it today. "

Despite his criticism Perry didn't have any immediate ideas for how to put social security on stronger footing, but said giving states their Medicaid funds in the form of block grants would go a long way towards saving taxpayers dollars and balancing state and federal budgets.

"Medicaid, we think we can save substantial dollars for the federal government and for the states if they'll allow us to implement that program," Perry said, urging the administration to allow states to be the laboratories of innovation.

Perry also disagreed with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that this week's initial public offering from General Motors shows the government's bailout of the auto companies had been a success.

I know we're all mad at the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security this weekend, but let's not forget what asshats the DEA can be as well. A friend sent me this today:

DEA officer stops at a ranch in Texas, and talks with an old rancher. He tells the rancher, "I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs." The rancher says, "Okay, but don't go in that field over there," as he points out the location.

The DEA officer verbally explodes saying, "Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me." Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removes his badge and proudly displays it to the rancher. "See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish. On any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?"

The rancher nods politely, apologizes, and goes about his chores.

A short time later, the old rancher hears loud screams and sees the DEA officer running for his life chased by the rancher's big Santa Gertrudis bull...

With every step the bull is gaining ground on the officer, and it seems likely that he'll get gored before he reaches safety. The officer is clearly terrified. The rancher throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs...

"Your badge. Show him your BADGE!"

And Democratic Spinefulness:

Republicans Can't Understand Why Obama Doesn't Adopt Their Program Of Failure and Ruin

Michael Steele promises to be GOP's connection to average Americans and, apparently, below average ones too

One of the worst of the Inside-the-Beltway political journo hacks has long been-- for as long as anyone remembers, in fact-- David Broder over at the Washington Post. And those looking for a dose of insipid, asinine Broderism won't be disappointed by his silly column tomorrow about how badly Obama needs Republicans. Broder, of course, is non-partisan, bipartisan, post-partisan... so long as all those sans accrue to the benefit of whichever Establishment GOP elitists he happens to be shilling for. When he says that "The first important roll call of the Obama presidency looked as bitterly partisan as any of the Bush years," he isn't blaming his heroes the Republicans, of course. He knows the talking points-- it was Pelosi's fault. That not a single Republican legislator voted for a Stimulus package Obama gave away the store to Republicans when crafting and that not a single Republican legislator voted for a Stimulus package that the overwhelming majority of American voters want to see passed isn't because they're too partisan; it's because Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel and David Obey are. And Broder ought to know; every single Republican in Town has adopted that point as their mantra this week.

Broder, of course, would never in a million years think to ask the real front-line Republicans-- the party's governors, who have to face real families in real pain all over America, not just Grover Norquist, Tony Perkins and Rush Limbaugh sucking down weenies at Villager cocktail parties. The Republican governors see it a little differently from the viciously partisan ideologues and obstructionists.

Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama's economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care.

Their state treasuries drained by the financial crisis, governors would welcome the money from Capitol Hill, where GOP lawmakers are more skeptical of Obama's spending priorities.

Inside the Beltway, the talk is about how Republicans are losing patience with Obama and the Democrats. Mitt Romney, still deluded enough to think he's going to be his bigoted party's first Mormon nominee was appalled that the Democratic President, House and Senate didn't adopt the anti-Stimulus bill the Republicans offered, chock full of proposals that have impoverished the country over the past 8 years while further enriching a few thousand families, one of which happens to be named Romney. Unless the Democrats adopt these failed and catastrophic policies, which were overwhelmingly given the big thumbs down by the voters in November, the Republicans are going to... continue obstructing and whining to the media and trying to undermine America. They're Republican politicians; what else could anyone expect from them.

Their Party's laughable new chairman, Michael Steele, started his term with a huge acknowledgment that the GOP is the Party of Doom and Obstruction:

"Let me start by saying, the goose egg that you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Now, folks, I know we’re in the era of bipartisanship, but it’s easy to be bipartisan when you outnumber the minority two to one. Anyone can be bipartisan then. But I thought it was very, very important that you sent a signal, and you sent it loudly and very clearly, that this party, that the leadership of this caucus, will stand first and foremost with the American people. You made it very clear that in order to grow through this recession, that you would not redistribute the wealth of the people of this nation. That you would empower them to earn it, invest it, save it, and spend it on their terms."

I suppose by "the American people," he means the folks in those board rooms he's vowing the GOP will be taking its marching orders from. The actual American people want the Stimulus package-- just like the Republican governors, who Steel ought to be paying more attention to, unless he's planning on hitting the pavement looking for a new job along side Ken Blackwell and Chip Saltsman.

CAN DAVID BRODER AND OTHER LOVE STRUCK McCAIN PROPAGANDISTS SAVE HIS DOOMED PRESIDENTIAL BID?

The only substantial difference between the Washington Post's chief political journalist and a John McCain campaign press release writer is that there is no proof that Broder takes any money from McCain. I had to laugh this morning when I detected shock in Broder's column, A Not-So-Solid Republican South. Background: McCain spent last week stumbling from photo-op to photo-op that took him to places Republicans don't ever bother with. In other words, he went to visit working class neighborhoods instead of country clubs for well-off white folks. But "on the same day that Pennsylvanians gave Clinton a victory... voters in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District failed to settle who will fill the seat left vacant when Republican incumbent Roger Wicker was appointed to the Senate." Actually voters in MS-01 gave over half their votes to the two Democrats and between the Democrat, Travis Childers, and Greg Davis, the Republican, who will be in the run-off, the Democrat had 49% and the Republican-- who outspent him by more than double-- had 46%.

Broder points out that "As a mayor and former state representative from the district's most populous county, Davis was the early favorite. He had the endorsements of Gov. Haley Barbour, Sen. Thad Cochran, Wicker and the man Wicker replaced, Trent Lott. Davis also outspent Childers by almost 2 to 1 and pummeled his opponent with a flood of negative ads, emphasizing the standard GOP menu of social issues and adding a vivid recital of alleged scandals in Childers's nursing home business."

Childers talked about the policies promulgated by Bush-- and rubber stamped by McCain-- that have resulted in staggering inflation (certainly at the gas pump, even if not in Broder's columns), the reality of catastrophic unemployment, and, of course, the endless Republican Party war in the Middle East. As Broder points out, the last special election resulted in a shock for the GOP and a shock for McCain, when McCain's candidate Jim Oberweis was beaten by a lackluster and previously unknown Democrat for the exurban seat vacated by Denny Hastert in Illinois. "The message to Republicans," Broder advises his boy McCain, "could not be more plain: At a time when the public has soured on President Bush and the GOP, the old appeals are just not enough. To have a chance, Republican candidates have to expand their reach and reframe their message." For some reason, he doesn't mention that they also need to go back into history and change their voting records. McCain's couldn't be clearer. He was on the wrong side... of everything.

Still, Broder sees hope for his candidate. He senses McCain has "grasped that warning. Over the past week, as he toured the South from Selma, Ala., to Little Rock, he clearly was signaling a shift from the traditional GOP way of courting Dixie voters." Although McCain fought for over a decade to sabotage the Martin Luther King national holiday, Broder assumes most Americans-- if not most African-Americans-- don't have enough of an attention span to remember that McCain was consistently on the wrong side of that issue. "In Selma, McCain praised the African Americans who, more than four decades ago, were clubbed and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers at the start of their anti-segregation protest march to Montgomery. He vowed, in their memory, to bring his campaign-- and the publicity it attracts-- to the "forgotten places" of America, and to help the families in those communities if he becomes president." Those places have only been "forgotten" by McCain's party and not by the people who live there. Broder neglects to mention-- unlike the Wall Street Journal-- that almost everyone who came out to greet McCain at these stops was white-- and rich. "The first rally of the week, here in the heart of central Alabama’s Black Belt, attracted a crowd of about 75 people. And although Selma is 70% black, the small gathering was almost exclusively white. Although a third of the town lives below the poverty line, the people in attendance looked affluent." Broder is hoping that by making ritual denunciations of the poor schnook who fronted the regime-- and the policies-- he has supported, he can hoodwink people into thinking he represents some kind of change.

At other stops, including the Kentucky hamlet where Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty and in New Orleans's hurricane-obliterated Lower Ninth Ward, McCain condemned the performance of the Bush administration and offered his own free-market ideas for creating more jobs, improved schools and better health care.

...But what is incontestable is the fact that McCain sees the need for Republicans to reach beyond their past comfort level and engage the many Americans who have every reason to doubt they are anywhere on the GOP agenda. To many of those struggling to survive, who are accustomed to being ignored, if not exploited, the Bush administration's blindness to the plight of the residents of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit is all too typical of the Republicans' mind-set.

Relying on the same old right-wing messages cost the Republicans heavily in 2006 and lost them Hastert's seat this year. Roger Wicker's may be the next "safe" Republican bastion sacrificed by that blindness. John McCain does not want to find himself on the same list.

Broder is the dean of the blinkered Beltway media establishment that will never recognize that their boy McCain is very much a part of that right-wing neo-Confederate Republican Party that makes their skin crawl. The NY Times' Frank Rich doesn't carry the same baggage (McCain's) that Broder carries. His column today points out that McCain was the big political loser last week.

First of all, the message the mainstream media missed in Pennsylvania was not how the bickering Democrats have destroyed their chances to win the presidency in November-- which is relentlessly pushed by right-wing propagandists and endlessly repeated by empty-headed talking heads on CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC-- but how Pennsylvania voters have reiterated that any Democrat is preferable to another 4 years of Bush (i.e.- a McCain presidency).

...27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

For such a bitterly divided party, the Democrats hardly show signs of clinical depression. The last debate, however dumb, had the most viewers of any so far. The rise in turnout and new voters is all on the Democratic side. Even before its deathbed transfusion of new donations, the Clinton campaign trounced the McCain campaign in fund-raising by 2.5 to 1. (The Obama-McCain ratio is 3 to 1.)

Frank's reporting about the McCain photo-ops among the "poor folk" isn't blinkered by the same constraints that makes Broder worthless as a journalist when it comes to covering anything McCain-related. His analysis of McCain's attempts to "reach out" to Alabama voters was not based on wet dreams of a President McCain, the ways Broder's was.

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain vowed that he would not “roll out a long list of policy initiatives.” (He can’t, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as the Birmingham News reported, this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn’t prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers: inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private fund-raiser.

The Bush Economic Miracle-- even more so than the Bush foreign policy agenda-- has been completely rubber stamped by John W. McCain. As the economy continues to deteriorate McCain-- and vulnerable Republican incumbents like Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, James Inhofe, John Sununu, etc-- will find it more and more difficult to run away from their own voting records and from their own complicity in Bush's disastrous presidency. And meanwhile, voters will be watching more and more statements of fact from the DNC, like this one:




UPDATE: McCAIN LOSES NEVADA GOP CONVENTION

The far right's presumptive nominee couldn't keep the Nevada state Republican Party convention from disbanding in confusion as a majority of delegates proved to be loyal to Ron Paul, rather than McCain. The Party establishment closed down the whole shebbang and will probably reconvene in Guantanamo or someplace else where the GOP can keep everything buttoned down and under control. So, as of now, Nevada has no delegates to the Hate Fest in Minneapolis.

WHY IS THE WASHINGTON POST SHOVING JOHN McCAIN DOWN AMERICA'S THROAT?

I'm in the middle of reading the new book by David Brock and Paul Waldman, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media and one of the first things I realized is that the Washington Post shouldn't allow David Broder to write about John McCain. He's proven himself to be a steadfast p.r. agent for John McCain over the years and the Post should just ask him to cover other topics instead.

So was I surprised to wake up this morning and see another misleading Broder piece extolling the greatness of John W. McCain? Not at all. In fact I was prepared for it because when I woke up Howard Kurtz and one of the Republican Party's embedded reporters on CNN, Amy Holmes, were making the point about how fairly and scrupulously the media has treated McCain and how they most certainly do not have their collective head up his ass.

I laughed as I pulled on my socks and shut off the TV and remembered something I had read yesterday at the live blog session over at Firedoglake with Paul Waldman in response to a question from CMike: "Do you believe if you make an effective enough case the press can be persuaded to conduct itself more objectively [towards McCain]?"

That’s the $64,000 question. Our book alone may not be enough to convince the entire Washington press corps to do some introspection on the way they’ve been covering McCain. But we hope we can start a conversation-- one that will be enhanced in the blogosphere-- that will ultimately push the issue to the point where they can’t ignore it. And while some of my friends might not agree, I do believe that reporters want to do a good job. So our hope is that they can be persuaded to take a step back and ask whether their coverage of McCain has been what it should be, or whether they’re just repeating that he’s a principled maverick delivering straight talk, over and over and over…

That's very idealistic of Paul... but by reading his own book I imagine he can't possibly include Broder in his hopeful construct. If there's one thing Broder is likely to me remembered for after he's worm food, other than being McCain's biggest cheerleader in the Washington press corps, was his disgraceful role in urging the country to invade Iraq on trumped up and manipulated intelligence. The campaign broadside that Broder did for McCain today certainly flows right out of his own role as someone who helped push the country into the Iraq fiasco.

He sets it up as a comparison between Barack Obama's historic and inspiring speech on race-- which he denigrates into another anti-Obama Pastor Wright smear that Broder has made into his 2008 personal trademark-- and McCain's grubby and completely unremarkable talk in L.A. last week about maintaining and expanding the Bush Regime's Crusader mentality towards the Middle East. The key purpose of Broder's love letter to McCain today seems to explain how his is "a vastly different approach from President Bush's and one that might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years." You might think it was written for him by one of the 66 lobbyists driving the Double Talk Express or by Mark McKinnon except this is the standard Broder line that should have caused the Post, if it were even vaguely interested in objectivity-- which it certainly isn't-- to bench Broder from writing about his pal McCain for the duration of the presidential campaign.

Broder always takes all of the McCain p.r. tropes as gospel and amplifies and aggrandizes them for the masses. In this case, he is building on the carefully crafted McCain campaign theme that he is a "military hero" (though he never did anything heroic) and a "warrior" (although his only war-making was one dismal failure after another, crashing 5 planes due to his own pigheaded refusal to pay attention to instructions, accidentally killing hundreds of American sailors, bombing innocent Vietnamese civilians from 20,000 feet, and eventually being shot down, captured and imprisoned). Tragic, yes, but heroic? Why?)

Like Obama's address, this McCain speech is worthy of careful study and analysis. It began with a note that only a warrior such as McCain could choose-- a declaration by the son and grandson of combat veterans and the survivor of a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp that "I detest war" as only a man who has experienced its horrors can do. "Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war," he said, in rejecting the caricature of his own belligerence and explaining why he emphasizes diplomacy as the principal tool in a presidential arsenal and says that scholarships will be more important than smart bombs in winning the war on terrorism.

Broder is misleading his readers. McCain craves war and is running for president primarily to be a war president. His entire campaign is geared towards persuading Americans that they must forget that his economic and social positions are anathema and detrimental to their own well-being and instead vote for his as Commander-in-Chief. Broder makes no mention of "100 more years of war," or of the inevitability of a military draft if McCain's agenda ever gets enacted or of McCain's little "Bomb Iran" singing debut. Broder claims McCain repudiates unilateralism but he and McCain are as convincing as Bush and Condi are when they make believe they also repudiate it. At least Cheney, who speaks for all of them, is honest enough to embrace it.

And, of course, Cheerleader Broder never tries to compare or contrast McCain's hot air with his actual votes. Hot air is cheap; votes are the bottom line. And their is always a vast chasm between McCain's p.r. position and his actual votes in the Senate. "America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model," he said. "We can't torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control." Who, reading that would think that McCain has voted in favor of torture? No one, but if Broder were an actual journalist, rather than an insipid old p.r. hack, he would provide the facts rather than just the soaring rhetoric.

When Chris Matthews let the truth of McCain's relationship with the national media-- “The press loves McCain, we’re his base"-- he didn't single anyone out for special attention but always at the head of the line to press a big wet one on McCain's butt is David Broder. Free Ride does what Broder and the national press corps will never do. It examines how the media aided McCain's rebirth following the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, and how it then reinvented his half dead carcass as the “maverick,” “straight-talking” hero of the 2000 primaries, never once looking at his extremist voting record, a record that places him firmly with the radical right on every important issue facing America. McCain's voting record mimics the voting records of extremists like Larry Craig (R-ID), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), David Vitter (R-LA) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and is immeasurably closer to the neo-fascist bloc in the GOP caucus-- crackpots like Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), James Inhofe (R-OK), John Cornyn (R-TX)-- than he is to mainstream conservatives like Arlen Specter (R-PA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), John Warner (R-VA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), or Chuck Grassley (R-IA).


UPDATE: YES, A FEW JOURNALISTS BUCK THE NATIONAL TREND AND DO COVER McCAIN OBJECTIVELY

Arizona journalists are more aware, or at least more willing to be forthright, than the Beltway Insider hacks in regard to who the Real McCain is. The best, of course, is Amy Silverman at Phoenix's New Times, a one-women antidote to Boderism. But you don't always have to go all the way to Arizona to find the truth about McCain. Today's Boston Globe published an article by Susan Milligan questioning McCain's "commitment" to public financing and the false media talking point that he is a reformer.

Senator John McCain has retreated from his longtime commitment to public financing of campaigns since he started planning his 2008 bid for the presidency, according to nonpartisan advocates who had hoped McCain would be a strong voice for reform during the most expensive presidential campaign in history.

McCain, who angered conservatives when he coauthored a bipartisan law aimed at taking big money out of politics, in 2003 cosponsored legislation to expand the federal matching system to help fund presidential campaigns, but failed to add his name to similar measures in 2006 and 2007. And while McCain once supported a law in his home state of Arizona providing full public financing of campaigns, he now says he opposes that idea at the federal level.

One theme that has never changed in McCain's career: rules are for other people, not for John W. McCain.

IS DAVID BRODER THE OFFICIAL SPOKESPERSON FOR THE CONNECTICUT FOR LIEBERMAN PARTY?

You may recall that last week treacherous and disloyal Bush Democrat Chris Carney (PA-10) denegrated Hillary Clinton in his district newspaper and endorsed a Chuck Hagel-Mike Bloomberg ticket. Since deceiving his way into office last year, Carney has worked hard to amass a voting record that should make this endorsement a surprise no one (except maybe those at the DCCC who think no further than bigger offices and better parking spaces for themselves).

This morning the worst of the old time and hackish Beltway pundits, David Broder, echoed, predictably, Carney's call for mediocrity. Broder has been around long enough to know that, despite his kind's most heartfelt wishes for more and endless Bushism, the American people's capacity for being tricked is coming to an end. The Broders of the Beltway are now probing the possibilities of inserting anything to stop Hillary, even if that means 2 Republicans, Hagel and Bloomberg, who haven't signed on to the pledge the pathetic pygmies™ have taken to give America the third George W. Bush term people like Broder think we need (and deserve).

Broder, of course, never mentions that his "independent" hero, Chuck Hagel has an entirely rubber stamp voting record that is mind-bogglingly extreme and even more out of step with mainstream Americans than doddering Inside the Beltway political pundits. You would never guess it by reading Broder but Hagel's shameful voting record is even more reactionary than Thad Cochran's, Lindsey Graham's, Kit Bond's, Chuck Grassley's, or Judd Gregg's. His votes of virtually everything are far more in line with bigots and neo-fascists like David Vitter, Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback and Jeff Sessions than they are with mainstream conservatives like George Voinovich, Olympia Snowe, John McCain, Richard Lugar.

Broder is guessing Hagel doesn't want to run for his third Senate term and he puts forth the anti-Democrat Beltway meme whose mantra is that "Washington is gridlocked in partisan battle between two equally spent parties," rather than being capable of looking in the mirror and at Bush and his cronies and seeing why Washington is a mess. Also, predictably, Broder seeks to paint Hagel as someone who "was perhaps the first prominent Republican to break with the president" on Iraq. Of course that is a typical Broder distortion. Yes, Hagel shot off his mouth a few times about how catastrophic Bush's policies are but when it came to actual voting in the Senate, Hagel is still a dependable Bush-Cheney rubber stamp. Take for example S.J. Res 9, one of the bills Hagel was running his yap about. It was voted on on March 15 and it called for a revision of U.S. policy in Iraq. It failed and Hagel joined all the Republicans but Gordon Smith to vote against it. (Lieberman and 2 reactionary Democrats, Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor joined Hagel and the Republicans in perpetuating the occupation of Iraq Hagel has been whining about in a way that has so impressed David Broder.)

Hagel said that he and Bloomberg have "had some talks" but that neither of them is ready at this moment to form a partnership or stake out a strategy. Like everyone else, Hagel understands that the mayor's personal wealth would permit him to organize a campaign, starting in the winter or spring, and still have time to gain ballot access in enough states to make him a credible national candidate. But wealth alone will not bring him within reach of 270 electoral votes, and Hagel shares the view that Bloomberg is not interested in being "a spoiler" whose only effect would be to hurt one of the major-party candidates.

Broder has proven what a useless tool he's become. Perhaps he should push a Chris Carney/Art Carney ticket instead. Or maybe he should interview Mayor Bloomberg and ask him how he'd feel about running with someone of years and years of unrelenting service in the interest of far right extremism, who has been consistent in denying women the right to choice, consistent in treating minorities as 12th class citizens, consistent in anti-labor policies, consistent in devastatingly anti-environment policies, consistent in homophobia, consistent in legislating massive tax breaks for the wealthy and shoving a bigger and bigger burden on working people, consistent in supporting trade policies that are wrecking our country's economy and rending its social fabric... you know, stuff like that.