What Drives Mitch McConnell? A Conscienceless, Near-Cartoonish Pursuit of Power

by Thomas Neuburger

For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame.
—Robert Moser, Rolling Stone

Mitch McConnell is a unique individual in the modern political world.

Most politicians are filled with a mix of fevered desires, flattering self-projections, a bittersweet mashup of idealistic regret and sad bows to "practicality," naked ego and the many attractive perks of the "Oh It's You, Senator" club (search on "you get it all the time") — and especially lots and lots of money. (I must add though that their vast corruption is vastly under-compensated, a point I've many times; the money-corrupted among them need a much better agent.)

It's a rare politician who simply wants power and power alone, power for its own sake, power unalloyed by other human desires. Mitch McConnell, like Rupert Murdoch and the real Mayor Daley (Richard J.) before him, is such a man.

At least that's the assessment of Dan Froomkin, writing at his site Press Watch:

Three things the media should be telling you about Mitch McConnell

McConnell’s motivations are essential context for a public trying to understand what’s going on in the Senate – and specifically, why McConnell is blocking Democratic attempts to introduce evidence that wasn’t available to the House.

The good news is that Mitch McConnell is not a hard guy to figure out. Indeed, countless, extensive profiles of him have concluded the same thing: that he is singularly uncomplicated. His only ideology is power. ...

[T]here is no appealing to reason with Mitch McConnell. There is no appealing to precedent, or to a sense of history. There is no appealing to the separation of powers, the role of Congress, or the sanctity of the Senate. There is certainly no appealing to the idea of country or the Constitution over party.

If it doesn’t help Republicans get elected, he’s not interested.

Here are three of the things reporters know about McConnell, but routinely fail to tell their readers and viewers...

Those three things are these:

1. Since money in politics is the chief agent of corruption, and Republican corruption means the acquisition of power for its own sake — what ever you think of Democrats, and I don't think much of them these days, Republicans aren't called "authoritarian" and "fascist" for no reason — "the only issue that McConnell really cares about is opposing any limits to money in politics."

Quoting Alex Parene:

Mitch McConnell is the great avatar of the decades-long enclosure of our public life by money. He does not offer a stirring vision of conservative national greatness or even ends-justify-the-means rationales for Senate horse-trading ... In Mitchworld, you simply pay—and pay, and pay—to play.

And:

Being a Senate majority leader who doesn’t care about almost any particular outcome to any particular political issue not directly related to making sure your funders can fund you actually seems to take quite a bit of pressure off, job performance–wise.

A simple, uncomplicated life. When you want exactly and only one thing, distraction is never an issue.

2. McConnell has "ruined the Senate," and that's just fine with him.

As Froomkin writes, "McConnell has dramatically transformed the U.S. Senate, from a place that once relied heavily on tradition and precedent and was less partisan and more deliberative than the House, into a slaughterhouse for any legislation that might hurt his donor pool."

But that's just one way he's damaged the body he's part of. The other way is to empower a radical judiciary that is more and more taking power away from the legislature, including the Senate, and arrogating to itself decisions the Founders meant the people to decide.

According to Charles Homans, "In the coming years, battles over voting rights, health care, abortion, regulation and campaign finance, among other areas, are less likely to be decided in Congress than in the nation’s courthouses. In effect, McConnell has become a master of the Senate by figuring out how to route the Republican agenda around it."

Using the Senate to diminish the Senate — that's our Mitch.

3. The simplicity of his wickedness renders him almost cartoonish.

Robert Moser (also quoted above), writes of McConnell, "like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies."

And James Zengerle noted in Politico, "While most politicians desperately want to be liked, McConnell has relished—and cultivated—his reputation as a villain. After all, he achieved his iron-fisted grip on the politics of his home state and his fractious party on Capitol Hill through discipline, cunning and, oftentimes, fear. ... [A]t the moments that have found him happiest—winning elections, blocking bills, denying the sheen of bipartisanship to President Barack Obama—he has radiated not joy but menace."

Yet as amusing as cartoon villainy is to contemplate, this last point should not be dwelt on.

McConnell may well be the most dangerous man in politics today, not just because of his terrible goals — the acquisition of total power for a party that hosts the worse authoritarians in the country — but also because not an ounce of conscience pulls him back from the brink of his most terrible deeds.

He not only fails to fear that brink; he relishes finding it.

If I could choose just two politicians to remove immediately and forever from office, from a list that includes such dark angels as Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, the murderous Mohammed bin Salman, our own progressive-hating Chuck Schumer and his House counterpart (yes, even her) and many more like them — I just might choose to eliminate Mitch McConnell. Twice.
 
 

Donald Trump's History Predicted A Kleptocracy-- And It's Here

I haven't noticed any of the polling firms that now routinely ask if people think Trump is a liar or not-- most do-- whether or not people think Trump is a crook. I predict that in less than a year, that will be a standard polling question-- and that eventually most Americans will say yes. I assume the majority of DWT readers already are ready to say Trump is a crook. Personally, I saw it first hand when I was in Azerbaijan and visited the ridiculous-- and never officially opened-- Trump Tower in Baku. Trump and his crooked partners were laundering money for Afghan drug lords and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But that's just one project in one small country. Trump's business partners everywhere are the most corrupt and criminal elements in their countries. There is no country where Trump has reputable, upstanding business partners.

Last week, writing for the American Constitution Society, Dan Froomkin reported that Trump's world of luxury real estate is fueled by money-laundering. And Mueller is studying the sector meticulously, especially in regard to the Putin-connected Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, all of whom are a criminal-- Mafia-- class. ALL OF THEM... 100%... no exceptions. There are no legitimate Russian billionaires, only criminals who looted the state after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The fact that money-launderers flock to luxury real estate is nothing new, and isn't much of a mystery either. It's the direct result of a major loophole in U.S. government rules that require banks to report cash deposits over $10,000-- but allow property owners to accept $10 million in cash for a condo without divulging who gave it to them.

When it comes to the real estate business, the anti-money-laundering rules only apply to banks and other financial institutions. So when buyers take out a mortgage from a lender, they are extensively scrutinized and unusual amounts of cash are reported to the government.

But by paying all cash-- behavior that would reasonably raise the most suspicion-- real estate buyers actually avoid setting off any alarm bells. The real estate agents and owners pocketing huge sums are under no legal obligation to report that to anyone.

For fraudsters, drug cartels, oligarchs and corrupt foreign government officials looking for a way to launder huge sums of illicit cash-- and park it somewhere safe-- high-end real estate is the investment of choice. "You can put a lot of money in one place at one time, without raising any eyebrows," says Heather Lowe, legal counsel for the dirty-money watchdog group Global Financial Integrity.

The Treasury Department explains it this way: "The real estate market can be an attractive vehicle for laundering illicit gains because of the manner in which it appreciates in value, 'cleans' large sums of money in a single transaction, and shields ill-gotten gains from market instability and exchange-rate fluctuations."

A New York Times series in 2015 found that more than half of the $8 billion spent each year on New York residences that cost more than $5 million comes from shell corporations that mask the real owners' identities, one possible sign of money-laundering.

Under pressure after the New York Times series, Treasury Department officials in early 2016 decided to try an experiment in Miami-Dade County and Manhattan, ordering title insurance companies there to identify the individuals who owned the shell companies making all-cash purchases-- and requiring them to send copies of the buyers' IDs to the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).

There were still some laughably large loopholes, chief among them the exemption of sales made with wire transfers, which are arguably the most common method of moving cash these days, especially from foreign sources.

But it helped: FINCEN reported on August 22 that a whopping 30 percent of the all-cash high-end real estate deals reported under the new program involved people who were already under government scrutiny due to potential money laundering-- including a One article in the Times series focused on apartments in the super-luxury Time Warner Center as an archetype, and "found a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, at least 16 of whom have been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies." That "included government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico.

Another Times article concluded that "the flight of wealth accrued in the chaotic capitalism of post-Soviet Russia has been a powerful force behind the luxury condominium boom reordering New York City’s skyline."

Jennifer Shasky Calvery, then the direct of FINCEN, said last year that in her previous job-- prosecuting Russian organized crime-- she often found members "based outside of the United States were laundering their funds through the U.S. financial system. Often, this involved the suspected purchase of personal residences with criminal proceeds."

The Miami Herald reported last year that "Trump helped local developers sell condos to buyers from Latin America and Russia, including people allegedly involved in corruption and wrongdoing, as well as to dozens of anonymous offshore companies." Buyers included "members of a Russian-American organized crime group, a Venezuelan oilman convicted in a bribery scheme and a Mexican banker accused of robbing investors of their life savings."

McClatchy reported in May about "fugitive oligarchs and their kin accused of laundering Kazakh money in posh U.S. real estate-- including Trump Organization properties."

The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan abruptly and controversially settled a major money-laundering prosecution in May that had targeted Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, the owner of Prevezon Holdings. He was accused of laundering some of the $230 million he obtained through Russian tax fraud in luxury New York apartments.

None of those apartments were in Trump buildings-- but there was a connection to the Trump campaign: One of Kastyv's lawyers was Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney who held a secret meeting in June 2016 with Trump’s son, son-in-law and then-campaign manager, offering them Russian government information on Hillary Clinton.

And once the laundered money is invested in real estate, the people who control the shell company are truly home free. It's just that simple.

They can use the property as collateral for a loan. They can charge rent and put the money in a domestic bank account. Ownership of shell companies can be shifted at any time, with no indication in property records. And the owner of the shell company can simply turn around and sell the property-- walking away with clean money. Depositing rental income or the proceeds of a real estate sale into U.S. financial institution sets off no automatic alarm bells.

"There's really no impediment" to accessing the money after it's been put into U.S. real estate, said Peter D. Hardy, a partner at the Ballard Spahr law firm and contributor to the Money Laundering Watch blog.

There may be some tax issues related to income or capital gains. But, Hardy said, "lots of money-laundering schemes don't really involve tax fraud per se, in terms of hiding the income. It's really more about being able to use it."

Lowe said if Treasury wanted to seriously crack down on money laundering through real estate, it would require real estate agents to adopt the same kind of due-diligence, know-your-customer standards as financial institutions.

Neither his campaign nor his presidency have led Trump to shy away from selling real estate to shell companies-- one of the possible indicators of money-laundering. In fact, a USA Today investigation published in June found that since Trump won the Republican nomination, "the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities."

That's a much larger proportion than the two prior years, USA Today found, but to be fair, the main concern is not so much money-laundering anymore as "that the secretive sales create an extraordinary and unprecedented potential for people, corporations or foreign interests to try to influence a President."

Meanwhile, Trump is welcoming a major figure in luxury U.S. real estate money-laundering to the White House on September 12: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

The Justice Department last year began the process of seizing more than $1 billion in assets of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the government-owned investment fund founded by Najib. Then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch called it "the largest single action ever brought under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative."

Those assets include a $30.6 million penthouse at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan and a $39 million mansion in the Los Angeles hills, both bought by shell corporations.

Najeeb might even bring this up in conversation with Trump: The assets are currently frozen, but they haven't actually been seized yet.

False Equivalency, Kyrsten Sinema And The Problem Of A Hackish Media

Last year Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ) tried appealing to out-of-district progressives while claiming to be a centrist in AZ-09. Obama beat McCain and Romney in the district; it's not a red district. This week Sinema, one of the Democrats who votes most frequently with the Republican on crucial roll calls, has been claiming that both parties are at fault over the government shut down. "Arizonans are angry and I don't blame them," she said Tuesday. "I am angry. Time has run out and both parties are responsible." Both parties? Really? I thought only lazy or brainless media hacks ever say that. Dan Froomkin covered the disgraceful way the media has made this into an exercise in false equivalency.

U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides-- combined with its obsession with process-- led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.

In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.

Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.

One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics-- and members of the public-- have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."

Blaming everyone-- Congress, both sides, Washington-- is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public-- or their editors-- will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation-- trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties-- is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

We need a more fearless media.

And we need a more fearless Democratic Party and more fearless Democrats in Congress, not more Kyrsten Sinemas-- nor even the Kyrsten Sinema we've got already.

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell ponders the question: "Is free the future?"

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win."

"Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

-- Wired editor Chris Anderson, in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, as quoted by Malcolm Gladwell (see below)

*

"The digital age, Anderson [right] argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.' Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: 'In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.' To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and 'yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.' . . .

"He goes on: 'There may be more [professional journalists], not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.' . . .

"It would be nice to know . . . just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does [Anderson] mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson's reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference."

-- Malcolm Gladwell, in Priced to Sell: Is free the future?,
his July 6 New Yorker essay-review of the Anderson book

by Ken

Funny how these things come together. Just yesterday, in reporting Dan Froomkin's new gig as Washington bureau chief of the Huffington Post (following his unceremonious dumping by the lords of washingtonpost.com), we were glimpsing the future of journalism though the eyes of Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. And that's going to lead us more or less directly into the remarkable essay-review by Malcolm Gladwell that I've sampled above.

I had been delighted to learn from Glenn's report that Dan Froomkin was in fact "inundated" with approaches regarding potential employment, and on that basis I was happy to quote Glenn's comment, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices." I wasn't so confident, though, about the rest of the paragraph from which that sentence was excised:

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

I certainly agree that the Infotainment News Media have done themselves no favor by (a) shrinking and dumbing down their news coverage and (b) purging it of anything that might be felt as hurtful by people in positions of power. Newspapers might have a stronger claim on readers' interest and loyalty if they were actually attempting to, you know, report the news, without fear or favor. And certainly it's good to know that some alternatives are taking shape, even if it's happening almost exclusively online.

Where my optimism runs aground is in any suggestion that we have even glimpsed a workable alternative to the mainstream "news" media that are now in possibly irreversible decline, however well deserved that decline may be.

In good part, this is because of the developments that are described in Chris Anderson's book -- as represented in Malcolm Gladwell's essay-review, I should make clear. While it may be true that newspapers could have tried bolstering rather than diluting their journalistic commitment as a counter to their economic decline, that's pretty much irrelevant to the array of social and economic forces that brought on that decline.

And the reason I'm recommending the Gladwell piece to you as urgently as I possibly can is, I'm guessing, the same reason Gladwell himself was moved to devote so much time and energy to writing about the book: that the reality it represents really is to a good extent real, and has to be grappled with by anyone who cares about ideas, the quality of ideas, and indeed the concept of "values" in civilization.

In case it isn't already clear, I should note that Gladwell doesn't draw at all the same conclusions from the phenomena observed by Anderson, or share any of Anderson's near-giddy excitement over those phenomena. This giddiness is reflected in Anderson's habit (as you may have noticed) of capitalizing the word "free," or should I say "Free"? It may well be true that we are witnessing "an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'” But is it really of no concern whether this is a good thing?

Here is Gladwell again:

The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.

Gladwell begins his piece by recounting a scene that I like to think will send a chill through most readers:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he'd just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper's content to the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic reader. "They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue," Moroney testified. "I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device." The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. "I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device -- not just ones made by Amazon?" He was incredulous. "That, to me, is not a model."

I suppose someone of Anderson's world-view might answer that it doesn't matter what the publisher thinks, since, after all, "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." (To which Gladwell replies: "But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?")

I recognize that it may be difficult, perhaps extremely difficult, to resist this trend, but difficult isn't the same thing as impossible, and of course not remotely the same thing as undesirable. I imagine that back in the days before copyright laws, cranks who argued that the people who created the content of published materials ought to have some rights in their selling were told there was nothing that could be done. "What are we supposed to do," voices of reason might have said, "travel all over the world grabbing larcenous publishers by the lapel and saying, 'See here, you can't do that, my good man. Why, you've got to give those chaps money, like a percentage of every copy you sell'?" I imagine that argument sounded pretty ridiculous the first several thousand times it was advanced.

If nothing else, I'm grateful to Chris Anderson for raising these issues -- possibly even grateful enough to read his book. And I don't want you to think I've given you more than a sampling of either his arguments or Malcolm Gladwell's responses.

There's an awful lot to discuss here, once everyone has read the Gladwell piece. I myself have, if not exactly a personal stake, then at least an active interest, as someone who used to write for money and now writes for, well, free. (No, not Free.) But that will have to wait till another time. For now, let's just bring this back to the questions raised by Glenn Greenwald about the future of journalism.

"Clearly, journalism itself is not dying," he says, and I guess I understand what he means. It's true that if you look around the blogosphere, you'll find a healthy number of people ready and willing, even eager, to do real journalism. It's also true that hardly any of those people are able to do more than eke out a bare-subsistence living -- and those are the lucky ones.

Because it also remains true that, at least as far as I know, nobody has yet imagined even the foggiest outline of a new form of news-gathering or news-disseminating system to replace the rotting hulk of the decaying Infotainment News Media. In other words, however badly the New York Times and Washington Post may be doing their job, nobody I'm aware of has even a ghost of an idea what could take their place.

(To be continued, I think.)

#

HuffPost puts Dan Froomkin in charge of its Washington coverage

Now that was journalism, more or less -- from Billy Wilder's 1974 film version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's classic 1928 play The Front Page.

"People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism [Dan] Froomkin practices."

-- Glenn Greenwald, on Salon.com (see below)

by Ken

Glenn Greenwald has the story of the Huffington Post's hiring of Dan Froomkin, whose shocking (but maybe not surprising) firing from his washingtonpost.com "White House Watch" column enraged me and a lot of other folks. Among those who responded similarly, apparently, was HuffPost editor-at-large Nora Ephron, who (Glenn reports) --

emailed Huffington with a one-line note: "I hope we're hiring him." Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.

According to Glenn, "Froomkin will oversee a staff of five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page."

Glenn has some interesting reflections on Dan's firing by the Post (for links, click through to the on-site version):

Though the precise reasons for Froomkin's firing by The Post remain unclear, there's no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions. In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques. In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being "liberal." But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed. Instead, it was Froomkin's practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post. Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:

Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . . But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.

Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what "both sides" say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media -- Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett -- are routinely heard in the very venues they attack).

In all sorts of ways, this new position for Dan is a brilliant fit, and a win for all concerned, not least HuffPost readers, of which there will be, I suspect, many more, and many more serious ones. Still, with his customary thoroughness, Glenn voices concerns. Dan has had no hesitation in calling out the Obama administration where it calls for calling out, and Arianna Huffington herself has a network of people in high places whom she may not be happier to see slammend than, say, the editors of the Washington Post were. Having spoken to both parties, Glenn comments: "Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice. "

The good news here is that Dan had a bunch of offers when the Post, instead of finding a way to integrate their best reporter into the newspaper itself, banished him from its website. Actually, "inundated" is the way Glenn describes the shower of "expressions of interest" and actual offers that came Dan's way. This tells us that a heckuva lot of people noticed the job he did at washingtonpost.com those six years. It also tells us, as Glenn writes, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices."

The bad news is that not just the Post, which is clearly determined to be a sort of newsletter of the Villagers, by the Villagers, and for the Villagers ("the house organ of the Village idiots" is how I put it, I believe), but the Infotainment News Media in general have little, and in fact apparently diminishing, appetite for "real journalism." It seems to give them indigestion.

#

Midyear snapshots of our glorious two-party system: (1) The Dems "in power" manage to get a crappy climate bill through the House

Is there more to governing than Rahm Emanuel?
Well, there could hardly be less!

by Ken

If by "power" you mean wheelin' 'n' dealin', crackin' heads, stabbin' backs, squeezin' balls, then I give you the Democratic Party at midyear 2009: Stand up, Master Rahm!

One of the big differences between our end of the political spectrum and theirs, as we've long known, is that they know how to enforce message discipline, whereas we tend to remain stuck on, you know, stuff we believe. Where a puling pile of puke could lead his sheeplike followers on a death march over the edge of the universe, it was only too predictable that there would be no such unanimity in a new Democratic administration, even with theoretically commanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

This extends to the respective media, of course. It was graceful of Rush Limbaugh to admit that for eight years he had been "carrying the water" for Little George, though naturally this admission didn't come till he was ready to publicly question the wisdom of all that water-carrying he had done. (This is the dark side of that sort of enforced unanimity. When the sheep turn on you, it can be as if you never existed. Try finding a Republican or a card-carrying right-wing extremist who even remembers the name George W. Bush, never mind acknowledges have shrieked his/her undying loyalty and screamed for the violent death of anyone who so much as questioned his sainthood for, oh, about seven years.)

At the same time, though, we knew that the reality-dealing anti-Bush media like The Daily Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show would never give the new administration a new free ride. That's not how we do things on our side. This seems to have caught the Washington Post by surprise in the case of its best reporting, which for some years had been done -- only on the paper's website -- by Dan Froomkin in his "White House Watch." More than anything, Froomkin's axing seems sttributable to his scrupulously even-handed coverage of the Obamaadministration, which is ironic, because you know damn well that the Post, which hews to the straight Inside the Beltway line, will never hesitate to trash the president. But they'll always do it from the approved Village view. Obama isn't a Villager, and alas for Dan Froomkin, neither is he.

So here we are, nearing six months in, with a president who keeps showing us showing us in those special speeches that he can rise to the occasion, at least rhetorically, as he did again in his remarks at yesterday's East Room LGBT Pride Month reception commemorating the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. But as the president himself made clear, his record will be judged by actions, not words.

How's that working out?


YOUR TWO-PARTY SYSTEM AT WORK:
THE HOUSE PASSES THE 'CLIMATE' BILL

On Saturday, when I expressed my deep misgivings about Waxman-Markey, the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill, which narrowly passed the house Friday night, I went looking for a good summary of the environmentalist objections. I had only to go to a Friday post by my online energy-and-environment go-to guy A Siegel on his Get Energy Smart Now blog, and there was a clip and transcript of the remarkable comments made by Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett on the House floor early Friday.

The remarks began, you may recall:

In his comments, the President emphasized that this is a “jobs bill”, tying this quite directly to prospects to dig ourselves not just out of the climate hole, but our unemployment hole. The President’s statement is a strong one, a powerful discussion of the value of meaningful, strong climate legislation. And, it will (should) be hard for any Democratic member of the House to ignore his call for a yes vote.

I also noted that by the time of the ACES roll call, Doggett voted yes, saying (according to the Washington Independent) "he was tired of listening to the members of 'the flat earth society' across the aisle making 'inane' arguments."

Today Politico has an inside account of the behind-the-scenes arm-twisting that went on in the House on Friday. Of course the Politico writers basically view the day's activities as a knuckle-busting triumph for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- unconcerned, for example, that the screws were put to progressives, who were basically accused of trying to destroy the president, the party, and the country, while the muddled and gutless right-wing Dems, owing to their supposed electoral peril, were largely left to vote, well, not so much their consciences as what it's supposed to be necessary for them to vote to win reelection.

So instead of going to Politico, I think we should turn the reading of their report offered by our Firedoglake pal Jane Hamsher:

What happened? Why did members like Doggett and Tom Perriello, who had committed to vote against the bill, switch their votes? [See CORRECTION below; Perriello was not committed to voting against the bill.]

Now we know:

Pelosi and her top lieutenants would spend the next four hours whipping, cajoling, begging and browbeating undecided Democrats -- and triple-checking their whip lists to decide who was a solid “yes” and who was prevaricating on the cap-and-trade legislation.

Yet no matter how many calls they made -- or how many times they checked and rechecked their list -- Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) kept coming up between 12 and 20 votes short of the 216 votes needed to win.

[]

Party leaders agreed to bring the bill to the floor during a meeting Monday night, even though some of the members present had reservations about forcing vulnerable Democrats to cast votes on a package that may not go anywhere in the Senate.

That's crap -- vulnerable progressive Democrats like Perriello were forced to vote yes against their conscience to give cover for safe Blue Dogs like Gene Taylor to vote "no."

One of Pelosi’s first targets was Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a key fence-sitter who wanted more money generated from the carbon trading to be directed to the research and development of green technology.

Pelosi talked to him again and again, but he wouldn’t budge. Her message to him was the same as it was to others: It wasn’t worth voting against the bill because of what wasn’t in it.

According to witnesses, Pelosi perched herself on the arm of Holt’s chair and went nose to nose with him for a half-hour warning him that his no vote could scuttle the entire climate change effort — and that liberals would have another chance to make their case once the bill came back from the Senate.

Around 2 o’clock, he became a “yes.”

Next up was Austin, Texas, liberal Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who had seemed to be leaning toward the bill during a Thursday night visit with Obama in the Oval Office — but then infuriated the White House midday Friday by declaring the measure too weak on polluters to win his vote.

An exasperated White House staffer told POLITICO it was “stunning that he would ignore the wishes not just of his president but of his constituents and the country.”

This is exactly the argument that was made to progressives during the supplemental -- it turned into a loyalty test to the President.

Then Pelosi began working Doggett as the two stood in the back of the chamber near the railing, making the same perfect-is-enemy-of-the-good argument she had used against Holt. Doggett ended up voting “yes.”During the vote, Washington Rep. Jay Inslee, one of the taller members of the House, guarded the doors on the floor leading out to the Speaker’s Lobby, warning members not to leave the floor in case anyone needed to switch his or her vote. But that didn’t stop some Democrats, like Colorado Rep. John Salazar, from voting no early and sneaking out to avoid getting pressured by party leaders.

Leadership aides say Texas Rep. Ciro Rodriguez promised Pelosi he’d vote yes, but voted no and sprinted from the chamber. California Rep. Xavier Becerra tried unsuccessfully to flag him on his cell phone — and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) bounded into the ornate Speaker’s Lobby off the floor shouting, “Rodriguez! Rodriguez!” as puzzled reporters looked on.

This is a picture of what will happen on the Public Option. Trial balloons are already being sent up about a sell-out, and the "co-op" plan is now the "liberal option" among the Villagers. Progressives (like Adam Green) who represent the feelings of 76% of the country are "extremists" who want to "kill health care reform."

CORRECTION: TOM PERRIELLO ALWAYS
INTENDED TO VOTE IN FAVOR OF ACES

There doesn't appear to be any doubt about Politico's report that Lloyd Doggett was one of the earnestly environmentalist Dems whose arms were twisted by Speaker Pelosi on Friday to support ACES. Apparently, though, Jane and I are mistaken in saying that Tom Perriello was among that group.

His office confirms that Congressman Perriello always intended to vote for the ACES bill, believing it represents a necessary starting point in taking action against manmade climate change, and despite my grave reservations about the bill, I understand that someone committed to protecting the environment could support it. After all, no less than the League of Conservation Voters has declared it "the most important piece of environmental legislation to ever come before the House of Representatives," adding, " The historic bill has the potential to transform America by creating clean energy jobs, improving our national security, and protecting our planet from global warming pollution," and taking the extraordinary step of promising to refuse endorsement in 2010 to any House member who votes against final passage of this bill." And my energy-and-environment go-to guy A Siegel allowed: "There are quite strong (and even compelling) arguments to vote for the bill despite its flaws. Honestly, in [Comgressmen Doggett and Pete DeFazio's] shoes, I don’t know what statement I would have made today."

Tom Perriello is one of the congressmembers we most admire, and we wouldn't want his position misrepresented. There is, apparently, some apprehension that he can be portrayed as a "tool" of Speaker Pelosi. Indeed, I've heard suggestions that the DCCC was actually pressing him to vote against the bill. It would be interesting to have confirmation of this. Is it really possible that, with both the White House and the House Democratic leadership supposedly all-out committed to the bill, the DCCC was actually lobbying against it?


NEXT UP: THE R's IN THE WILDERNESS

Howie already did some picking around in the ashes earlier today, but there's still more fun to be had.

#

With the firing of Dan Froomkin, the Washington Post takes its stand as the house organ of the Village idiots

Ah, of course, as the WaPo "make[s] sure we’re giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources," Dan Froomkin is out and the comedy team of Milbank and Cillizza is in.

"The Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin reveals much about the modern establishment media. Froomkin was one of the very few journalists working for an establishment outlet who understood and practiced the function of journalism. That is why he had a history of tension with the Post. Froomkin is everything that a political journalist is supposed to be -- and everything that most of them are not. That's why he was an aberration -- and, to them, an unpleasant one. Just look at the record."

-- Glenn Greenwald, in a Salon.com column yesterday, "The
Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media"

by Ken

Is there any doubt that on a daily basis, the best thing in the Washington Post, or at any rate the best coverage of national affairs, for some time now hasn't been in the Washington Post but is Dan Froomkin's resolutely to-the-point and thoroughly researched "White House Watch," which appears only on the paper's washingtonpost.com website? Or, I should say, appeared. Naturally now he's been shoved out the door.

At this point I would really encourage you to click through to the piece of Glenn Greenwald's I've quoted from above. It's Glenn at his very best, starting with a brief see-no-evil, hear-no-evil quote from David Gregory, followed by a long, passionate exposition from Dan Froomkin himself, which Glenn brackets as "The American establishment media in a nutshell." And that's before Glenn himself goes to work on the subject. This is a must-read.

But to back up a little, in case you're just coming into the story, yesterday RawStory's John Byrne offered this convenient summary:

Washington Post Media Communications Director Kris Coratti said the blog wasn’t a good use of Post resources.

“I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we’re giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources,” Coratti said in a statement to Politico Thursday. “Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com.”

The departure of his blog has raised eyebrows. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, also a progressive, said he was vexed because Froomkin was actually an Obama critic who stuck to his values rather than expressing blind fealty to the Democratic party.

“One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama — i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as “the Left” rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim,” Greenwald wrote. “It just got a lot rarer.”

The original Glenn Greenwald piece, which John quotes from, is still the basic text on the subject. Yesterday, however, Glenn followed up with a delicious piece called "Persecution of the Right and the Washington Post Op-Ed page and with the big piece I've already referred you to.

The "Persecution of the Right" piece, by the way, takes off from a preposterous whine by that toxic pile of sludge Charles Krauthammer that the imaginary lack of opposition to President Obama in the U.S. press "makes us a lot like Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run, with the exception that in Hugo Chavez-land, you go after that one station with machetes. I haven't seen any machetes around here, so I think we are at least safe for now."

Here's just a further taste of Glenn's big piece yesterday, picking up from the opening paragraph quoted at the top (naturally the original is link-laden):

The first public controversy erupted when then-Post Political Editor John Harris -- now, appropriately, the Editor-in-Chief of the consummately wretched Politico -- demanded that the name of Froomkin's column ("White House Briefing") be changed because Froomkin was too liberal to be presented as a real reporter. The Post's Ombudsman Deborah Howell defended that decision, noting that "Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's 'White House Briefing,' which is highly opinionated and liberal." She quoted Harris as saying that Froomkin's column "dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" and he "writes the kind of column 'that we would never allow a White House reporter to write.'"

Why was Froomkin deemed "liberal," inappropriate and biased? Because he pointed out that the Bush administration's claims were false and their policies radical -- i.e., he wrote what was factually true. But that -- writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power -- is the number one sin in establishment journalism. As David Gregory said, that's not their role. In the Bush era, pointing out the lies of Bush officials was all that was necessary to be deemed a leftist. Stephen Colbert explained why: "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

And Glenn is just warming up. As I said, this is a definite must-read.

#

Can Chimpy's latest lies about Iraq plans backfire? Also, Jonathan Turley goes (calmly) ballistic about impeachment, and we recall Gavin M's apt words

Today in Meseberg, Germany -- in Full Chimpy Mode,
where you can't easily separate the lies from the delusions

"For once, a Bush backfire in the Middle East wouldn't actually further entangle us in the region, but would serve the interest of the American people."

--Dan Froomkin, in his washingtonpost.com column today,
"Another Backfire in Iraq"

Just how screwed up is the Bush regime's foreign-policy apparatus? So screwed up, Dan Froomkin suggests, that this latest screw-up might actually help us. "President Bush's brashest attempt to lock in his Iraq policy beyond his presidency," he writes, "like so many other Bush initiatives in the region, appears to be backfiring spectacularly."

Dan goes on:

Secret negotiations between U.S. and Iraqi officials over a multi-year security agreement aren't so secret anymore. Details have been dribbling out over the last several days (see my June 5 column, Bush's Secret Iraq Deal).

And the American demands seem to be infuriating Iraqi lawmakers, some of whom are even threatening to kick out U.S. troops entirely.

"An ironic result of Bush's overreach," Dan writes, "could be that the domestic debate over American troop withdrawal -- in which presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is Bush's most ardent defender -- becomes moot, with the Iraqis insisting that we leave on their terms."

Dan quotes Chimpy himself, at a joint press conference this morning with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, responding to a question from Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen, in Full Chimpy Mode -- where it's difficult if not impossible to separate the lies from the plain delusions:

I think we'll end up with a strategic agreement with Iraq. You know, it's all kinds of noise in their system and our system. What eventually will win out is the truth. For example, you read stories perhaps in your newspaper that the U.S. is planning all kinds of permanent bases in Iraq. That's an erroneous story. The Iraqis know -- will learn it's erroneous, too. We're there at the invitation of the sovereign government of Iraq. . . .

And as I said clearly in past speeches, this will not involve permanent bases, nor will it bind any future President to troop levels. You know, as to -- look, Eggen, you can find any voice you want in the Iraqi political scene and quote them, which is interesting, isn't it, because in the past you could only find one voice, and now you can find a myriad of voices. It's a vibrant democracy; people are debating.

Isn't it good to know that those Iraqi voices branding our Chimpy as a wacko, Muslim-hating, imperialistic turd have his seal of approval? Maybe he does get the idea of democracy. (Nah, I don't think so either.)

Now, if you delve into coverage of the "secret" negotiations, you discover some interesting things about the permanent bases that Chimpy insists we're not negotiating for:

* We've actually scaled back out "request," from some 200 such bases to the mere 58 apparently specified in our latest proposal.

* More important, there is at play here a bit of linguistic sleight of tongue. You see, we're not demanding ownership of the bases in question. We just want to lease them, presumably for a long, long time. (More or less the way we "lease" Guantanamo Bay?) Our friend Siun was all over this story Sunday at Firedoglake.

This fake-legalistic lie-mongering, by which Chimpy manages to insist that the U.S. is not negotiating for "permanent" bases, is clearly yet another coldly calculated Bush regime lie. Although the calculation was clearly done by someone with significantly more mental agility (one can imagine Chimpy jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth when this morsel of verbal legerdemain was explained to him), in my mind his role as supreme mouthpiece for the deception qualifies by itself as a "high crime" worthy of immediate impeachment and conviction, followed by prosecution for war crimes which will result in his dying in prison. That's assuming the death penalty, of which he is after all such an enthusiastic fan, is off the table.

(Incredibly, there are still people, either mentally impaired or just bald-faced liars, who pretend it's still an open question as to whether Chimpy has lied to the American people. How are they allowed to walk in the company of decent folk without being showered with abuse for their imbecility or deceit?)


SPEAKING OF TALKING ABOUT IMPEACHMENT, JONATHAN TURLEY
-- IN HIS LACONIC WAY -- WAS BREATHING FIRE ON COUNTDOWN

Howie wrote earlier today about Kucinich and Wexler on impeachment, and in today's "White House Briefing" Dan Froomkin quotes ("via the Crooks and Liars blog") the pithiest moment of Georgetown law guru Jonathan Turley's rant last night on Countdown:

The framers, I think, would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion, of the Democrats in protecting President Bush from impeachment. I mean, they created a system that was essentially idiot-proof, and God knows we've put that to the test in the past few years, but I don't think they anticipated that so many members of the opposition would stand quietly in the face of clear presidential crimes.

The good professor, Keith Olbermann's No. 1 go-to guy for legal and constitutional counsel, spoke as calmly, logically, and tartly even-tonedly as always, but man, he was breathing fire! I'm delighted that Crooks and Liars has video up -- if you didn't see it, you owe it to yourself. (Of course I might also observe that I don't recall Professor Turley himself being quite this fire-breathingly gung-ho about impeachment before.)


STILL, MY FAVORITE WORDS OF WISDOM ON CHIMPY'S
NEVER-WILL-BE, NEVER-WAS IMPEACHMENT ARE GAVIN M'S

For some time now I've had these pearls of wisdom, from our friend Gavin M (of Sadly, No!) tacked up on the wall of my office cubicle, right below Homer Simpson's timeless observation "Trying is the first step towards failure":

There seems to have been a fairly seamless continuum between 'talk of impeachment is premature' and 'the moment for impeachment has passed.'

One grows suspicious of these moments-for-action that so often seem to whoosh by in the night without mention.

#

If the Bush regimistas would just quit, admitting they've waged an 8-year war of lies and deceit, we wouldn't have to prove all the lies one by one

Do we really have to keep proving, agency by agency, inspector general by inspector general, congressional inquiry by congressional inquiry, how the Bush regime turned the entire federal government into a vast right-wing propaganda machine for its catastrophic extreme ideological agenda?

"The significance of [Scott] McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now."

--Dan Froomkin, in his washingtonpost.com column yesterday,
"Vindication for the Bush Critique"

It isn't even front-page news anymore when the Bush regime is caught in another web of lies and deceit. On page A2 of today's Washington Post:

Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
Appointees in NASA Press Office Blamed
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.

James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."

And so on and so on.

In public, Chimpy the Prez would say that we need "more study" of the climate-change issue. In private, the storm troopers of the regime were using every available resource to stifle all those inconvenient truths.

I've been saying since the revelations from poor Scotty McClellan's book broke that we weren't likely to gain much knowledge, since all we were likely to get was insider confirmation of what we've already managed to find out. And as much as I normally esteem the judgment of washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin, I didn't even bother to read his above-referenced column yesterday. The point -- "vindication of the Bush critique" -- seemed so obvious as to be hardly worth belaboring.

Note that the story of NASA's wholesale rigging of its scientists' research findings isn't new. As the story indicates, it was all aired pretty thoroughly back in 2006 -- and even then, was anyone really surprised? For years now, we've been hearing the same story, agency by agency, about how the managers of the Bush regime distorted or even shut down the agency's rightful functions to turn it into yet another tentacle of the propaganda machine. All that's new is the IG report (at least something about NASA's role in the climate-change issue finally got studied

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in fact we need more of these reports, or something to show the American people that the dissatisfaction they're registering in Chimpy the Prez's ghastly poll numbers isn't based on stuff just happening. Their onetime hero didn't just make a bum decision or two along the way, with unfortunate consequences. The regime to which so many Americans for so long showed such unshakable loyalty was always a festering fraud. It was always a hotbed of ideological hooliganism, in cahoots with corrupt corporate profiteers, advancing an extreme right-wing agenda through a combination of secret stealth and public propaganda, including blatant lying.

The job of rebuilding a trustworthy federal government is so enormous, so overwhelming, and it has to be done at the same time as so many ongoing crises have to be managed, that I don't see how we can have much hope of success unless the country faces up to the dimension of the challenge. How can we hope to make progress with the mess in Iraq, for example, as long as anyone takes seriously anything said by anyone involved in the regime's all-deception-all-the-time policies there?

I think back to events as recent as the 2004 presidential campaign, when most of the groundwork was laid for the regime's spectacular fall from public grace, but there were still few visible signs of what was to come. Back then anyone who spoke ill of Chimpy the Prez was still dismissed, even by the so-called mainstream media, as a "Bush-basher." Back then supposedly respectable media types were still insisting that no proof existed that Chimpy had ever "lied" -- the magical "L" word.

I'm not really angling for an apology, though I wouldn't mind one from the hordes of dimwits who jeered at every attempt to penetrate the nation-choking jungle of Bush propaganda as "Bush bashing." But what would be nice would be an acknolwedgment that anyone who wasn't "Bush-bashing" was at very best deluded.

So maybe we do need more independent verification of the truths we've known for years about the Bush regime's commitment to untruth. And in that spirit I've gone back to what Dan Froomkin had to say yesterday. Here's the start:

Vindication for the Bush Critique

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

As the response to former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book enters its second week, the focus has shifted to the messenger rather than his message.

McClellan is a flawed vessel for any serious communication. From behind the podium, he made a mockery of the press and the public's right to know, most notably by repeating non-responsive and sometimes ludicrous talking points. He has yet to persuasively explain his change of heart. And his insistence that self-deception rather than a conscious disregard for the truth was behind what he now describes as the White House's consistent lack of candor is spectacularly self-serving.

But the significance of McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now. Among them:

* That Bush and his top aides manipulated the country into embarking upon an unnecessary war on false pretenses;

* That Bush is an incurious man, happily protected from dissenting views inside the White House's bubble of self-delusion;

* That Karl Rove's huge influence on the Bush White House erased any distinction between policy and politics, so governing became about achieving partisan goals, not the common good;

* That Vice President Cheney manipulates the levers of power;

* That all those people who denied White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity were either lying or had been lied to;

* That the mainstream media were complicit enablers of the Bush White House and that its members didn't understand how badly they were being played.

By coming back again and again to the CIA leak story, McClellan also validates a key theme of the Bush critique: That the Plame case was a microcosm of much that was wrong with the way the Bush White House did business.

This is no way to run a country, and it's one of those routine cliches to say that America deserves better. But maybe America doesn't deserve better. At least not as long as we don't own up to the real-world consequences of what we do.

#

How far will "Big Dick" Cheney go to get whatever the hell he wants? We might equally well ask, "How deep is the ocean? How high are the stars?"

"Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."
--House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers [right], responding to the VP's office's latest preposterous claims that his staff isn't accountable to Congress, no way, no how


Am I the only one who did a double take, and then giggled, at the opening line of Dan Froomkin's Washingtonpost.com column today, "Cheney's Total Impunity"? You tell me:

"How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?"

How far will Vice President Cheney go??? Doesn't the very act of asking such a question suggest that somewhere in the universe there exists some limit to how far this vice president will go to get what he wants? Does anyone really believe that such a limit exists?

Let's say someone had asked back in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, "How far will Vice President Cheney go to get us into war in Iraq?" Can anyone think of anything, anything at all, he wouldn't--in fact didn't--do?

So the latest blunt refusal to offer up Cheney chief of staff David Addington for congressional testimony runs true to form. Indeed it's heartening to see that stripping Big Dick's boy Irving Libby from the team hasn't led to any diminution of the gall and effrontery level. Because, of course, the Dickster still has Addington, the remaining half of his old pair of Spawns of Satan Bookends, on the job.

And the loads of crap these so-called legal geniuses of the Bush regime come up with--my goodness, if you submitted one of these briefs as a paper in a Government 101 class, you'd be lucky to come away with an F-minus.

Here's our Dan's take on the latest round:

Cheney's Total Impunity

By Dan Froomkin

How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?

Last spring, Cheney asserted that he wasn't subject to executive-branch rules about classified information because he wasn't actually part of the executive branch.

Now his office argues that he and his staff are completely immune from congressional oversight. That's right: Completely immune.

Cheney's latest claim came in a response to a House Judiciary Committee request for vice presidential chief of staff David S. Addington to testify about his central role in developing the administration's torture policies.

Cheney lawyer Kathryn L. Wheelbarger wrote back: "Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by a law what a Vice President communicates in the performance of the Vice President's official duties, or what a Vice President recommends that a President communicate in the President's performance of official duties, and therefore those matters are not within the Committee's power of inquiry."

As it happens, that was only one of three startling responses in Wheelbarger's letter.

She also wrote: "The Chief of Staff to the Vice President is an employee of the Vice President, and not the President, and therefore is not in a position to speak on behalf of the President."

Disregard, for a moment, the fact that Addington wasn't actually asked to speak on behalf of the president - but about his "unique information and perspective." Contrary to Wheelbarger's central assertion, Addington actually does work for the president. When he took over the job previously held by Scooter Libby -- who has since been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case -- Addington also inherited Libby's title as "assistant to the president." See, for instance, his official White House profile.

Cheney's office somehow managed to omit Addington from the White House staff list submitted to Congress. But Addington isn't on Cheney's public Senate payroll either.

Finally, Wheelbarger cites, "separate from any question of immunity from testimony," questions of privilege "protecting state secrets, attorney-client communications, deliberations, and communications among Presidents, Vice Presidents, and their advisers."

In a letter to Addington, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers yesterday lamented Wheelbarger's "legalistic and argumentative response" and warned that if Addington refuses to appear voluntarily, he may be subpoenaed. (Conyers issued the same threat to former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, both of whom also declined to appear voluntarily.)

The Conyers letter cites media reports that describe Addington as the driving force behind the administration's most controversial legal arguments. Among the citations: Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Phillippe Sands in Vanity Fair, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in the Washington Post and Chitra Ragavan in U.S. News.

And Conyers notes: "Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."

He also attempts to turn one of Cheney's arguments against him: "While the issue of the immunity of senior advisors to the President is currently under litigation, there has been no suggestion that such immunity, even if recognized, would reach to the Vice President's office, an entity that, as you well know, is constitutionally quite different from the Office of the President.

"As to privilege, such concerns are traditionally and appropriately raised in response to specific questions and not as a threshold reason to decline a Congressional Committee's invitation to appear."

And Conyers concludes: "Presumably, you believe that whatever actions you took were necessary and comported with the law; in such circumstances, I cannot imagine why you would decline to appear and set the record straight. The American people deserve no less."

I know it gets tiresome to keep repeating it, but that's not going to stop me from asking once again how far anyone thinks the loyal squadrons of Republican rubber-stampers--in government and in the media--will tolerate the assertion of even the slightest privilege from the next Democratic president. Why don't we get together a pool to predict the exact decibel level of the right-wing stuck pigs' squealing?

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