Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

TWO honorees today. First, John Cole again, though I really ought to stop reading Balloon Juice if it's going to make me do things like go to the liquor store next to the Trader Joe's and spend eight bucks on a bottle of Southern Tier Pumking -- and I don't even LIKE beer most of the time, drinking only a sip or two of Sam Adams scrounged occasionally from Mr. Brilliant when the Jets are stinking up the joint on the TeeVee; or a tiny Kölsch beer with colleagues when I'm in Germany.

Anyway, he didn't write the beer post, so he gets today's award for this money quote:

All that is left now is for Chuck Todd and David Gregory to explain how this is a failure on the part of Obama. And no, I am not watching the damned debate tonight.

Second, the Almighty Driftglass, with some truly frightening Photochopping as he takes on Bobo again. Drifty has a fundraiser going, if you want to throw him a few shekels. But save some for #OWS.

How we know that Rick Perry's ascension to the presidency has already been decided

We knew that the media were already in love with Rick Perry. Even though we've already had a theocratic moron from Texas with a full head of hair and a glad-handing manner and cowboy boots in the White House, one who took control of a country with a surplus from eight years of peace and prosperity and wrecked it with tax cuts and wars that go nowhere, the men of the media loves them some good hair and cowboy boots. And it wouldn't matter if Barack Obama were somehow able to get unemployment down to 4% in the next fourteen months, these guys want them some cowboy and they're going to get it.



Bear witness:

Let's repeat David Gregory about four minutes in, shall we?

You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European

And there you have what passes for punditry: Talking about the possibility of secession is EXACTLY THE SAME as thinking that people who are poor should have the same right to health care as the rich do.



Coming next: Rick Perry's saying that there's nothing we can do to fix things other than to just pray to Jesus is the very definition of strong leadership.



There's nothing to do with David Gregory except throw our hands up in the sky, say "Hasa diga eebowai", and link to some Driftglass Photochoppin' here and here.

This is Afghanistan's future too

Last Sunday I was working (for a change) and decided to tune into the Sunday gasbags. After about five minutes of The Chris Matthews Show, during which Gloria Borger wanted to know where was the visual of Barack Obama out there in a hardhat and wishing he was more like Bill Clinton (bet you never thought you'd hear THAT from Borger) and panelist John Heilemann gleefully opined that without health care reform, Barack Obama's presidency will be "in ruins", I was ready to turn it off and then stick an icepick into my own forehead anyway. I've almost forgotten what it was like to live in a country in which while pundits might disagree with a president's policy, they didn't want so badly to see three years out of a four year term lie "in ruins". As much as I detested George W. Bush from the minute he declared his presidential run, on the twelfth of September in 2001, I hoped he knew what he was doing, and was willing to accept the partisan hit in terms of Republican dominance if he did. After all, presidential failure does not make for a nation that is a place you want to be.

But today's pundit corps, in its increasing lust for a blithering idiot like Sarah Palin, who makes the Miss South Carolina pageant contestant who blathered about the Iraqi people not having maps look like a rocket scientist to be president, can't accept that sometimes the health of the nation is more important than fantasizing about fucking the president; that someone who's stupid but "colorful" might make good copy to fill up the 24 x 7 cable news cycle, but could REALLY leave the country "in ruins".

I don't know why John McCain is still sought out for these programs, other than as a constant manifestation of the clubbiness inside the Beltway; the Russert - Sally Quinn - Cokie - Broder Axis of Idiotic Punditry that seeks to decide the success of a presidency based on their own little Social Register of acceptable hacks. It's clear that McCain's rage over being denied the prize that he feels is rightly his as payment for having been a POW has affected his cognitive abilities, for these days he's blathering almost as incomprehensibly as his erstwhile running mate:

MR. GREGORY: We're back with Senator John McCain.

Welcome back to the program. A lot to discuss here, a lot to react to. Let's get to your big issue this week, the issue of withdrawal. You heard Secretary Gates say here today, July 2011 is a date certain for the beginning of the withdrawal. Do you have a problem with that?

SEN. McCAIN: Yes. But let me also say, David, I support the president's decision. I think it's the right decision. I think that it can lead to success. It's a tough decision on his part to send young Americans into harm's way. As Secretary Gates said, casualties will go up, tragically. But I think he made the right decision, and I think that he is--the reality is he's not only tough decision to send young Americans into harm's way, but his--significant elements of his own party are, are opposed. So I strongly support the decision.

The problem with the date certain now is that not only there's a problem with that itself, but there's a, a significant contribution between what Secretaries Gates and Clinton were saying and what the president's spokesperson...

MR. GREGORY: Contradiction. Contradiction.

SEN. McCAIN: Contradiction...

MR. GREGORY: Yeah.

SEN. McCAIN: ...between what--and what his spokesperson said just a couple of days ago when he said the president said--he said--I'm directly quoting the president, that "withdrawal date is engraved, chiseled in stone, and I am the chiseler." Now, that's pretty straightforward. So what has that done? It has caused reaction such as you saw with the prime minister of Pakistan. Policymakers throughout the region--Pakistan, India, Iran, as well as Afghanistan--are now trying to figure out whether they can really go all in and support this effort, or do they have to accommodate? Because if we leave, they have to stay in the region. So it needs to be resolved. It needs to be resolved in this way, that we will not leave on a date certain. But we have every confidence--I do, I have every confidence within a year to 18 months we can achieve significant success. We were able to do that in Iraq. And we will leave and not allow the Taliban to make comments like Taliban prisoners are saying, "You've got the watches and we have the time." We don't want to send that message.

Got that? "Significant success in Iraq". O rly?

Bzzzzzzzzst! Sorry, Senator, your answer is wrong:

In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, a series of car bombings across Baghdad on Tuesday killed at least 101 people and wounded scores more, according to preliminary accounts by police and hospital officials.

Five bombs, including at least one suicide attack, struck near a university, a court, a mosque a market and in a neighborhood near the Interior Ministry. The blasts began shortly after 10 A.M. and reverberated through the city for the next 50 minutes, sending enormous plumes of black smoke into the air.

American helicopters, drones and airplanes circled the city in the immediate aftermath, while sporadic gunfire could be heard at one of the sites, near the main courthouse for western Baghdad and Zawra Park, which includes the city’s zoo and amusement areas.

A suicide car bomb in Dora, in southern Baghdad, struck a police patrol outside the main gate of the Technical Institution, a vocational college. Three police officers died there; many of the other victims were students.

The attacks were the worst in Iraq since twin suicide bombings destroyed three ministries on Oct. 25, killing at least 155. They matched a pattern of spectacular attacks in the capital, followed by weeks of relative calm. In August, two suicide car bombs struck the country’s finance and foreign ministries, killing at least 122.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has blamed the attacks on Al Qaeda in Iraq and remnants of the Baath Party in exile, though officials have yet to provide concrete evidence pointing to those involved.

The latest attacks came on the day Iraq’s Presidency Council was expected, finally, to announce a date for the country’s parliamentary elections. On Sunday, under pressure from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Iraq’s political leaders avoided a constitutional crisis and agreed on the rules for holding the election and distributing seats to the winners.

Many officials have expressed fears of intensifying violence ahead of the election, with insurgents and terrorists seeking to undermine Mr. Maliki’s government.

Is this John McCain's idea of "significant success"? If so, I'd hate to see what abject failure looks like.

David Gregory is a Whore

Get the feeling I'm a bit angry these days? Sounding a bit like my blogbuddy jurassicpork, whose bandwidth-devouring post I'm going to leave up because it's worth the download time? Well, why the hell shouldn't I?

Mr. Brilliant and I were talking this evening over burgers and uncharacteristically crappy "chopped and formed" onion rings at The Mountain House this evening (being too lazy, tired, and spent from overwork to grill anything at home) about how Walter Cronkite wasn't an investigative journalist but still managed to almost singlehandedly turn America around on Vietnam; about how Rachel Maddow is rapidly becoming an investigative journalist; about why the incredibly charismatic and schticky Greg Palast can't get work in this country; and why newspapers have only themselves to blame (*cough* Judith Miller *cough*) for their own downfall. Then after working a few more hours, I checked what's going on and found this:

There's a bevy of information in there, but one exchange that jumped out at us was the one between Sanford's press secretary, Joel Sawyer (who just today announced he's quitting -- good for him!) and David Gregory, the host of NBC's Meet the Press. In courting Sanford's office, Gregory wrote that "coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation as you really want to."

All the networks aggressively wooed Sanford's office in the period during and just after his disappearance, in an effort to convince that their show offered the perfect forum for him to address the controversy. CNN's John King told Sawyer he had always appreciated Sanford's "kindness, candor, and hospitality," and added, in a transparent attempt to bond, "I'm all for anonymous escapes myself." George Stephanopoulos offered his show, ABC's This Week, as a "civil forum to address this week's events." And producers for CBS's Face the Nation, ABC's Good Morning America, several Fox shows, and many others gave Sanford's office the hard sell too.

But the emails of Gregory -- who in the past has been known as a pretty aggressive questioner -- make particularly clear just what a get Sanford was seen as, and how far the networks were willing to go in promising a safe landing place for the governor.

Think about it: Barack Obama has been President for all of six months, and the hacks of television news are already sucking up to the guy they figured would be the next one -- a hypocritical asshole who thinks with his dick, who has absolutely no moral core, and who thinks nothing of letting poor students rot in subpar schools while he spends thousands of dollars of state taxpayer money to fly his dick down to Argentina for a little in-out in-out.

This is the guy for whom David Gregory, who I'm sure had much to say about how Walter Cronkite inspired him, was willing to pimp out Meet the Press. Not that Russert was any less of a fellater of Republicans; after all, he knew damn well that it was Dick Cheney who outed Valerie Plame. But if Gregory's dance with Karl Rove a few years ago didn't tell you who he'll lay down for, his making a nice cushy bed for Mark Sanford on Sunday mornings ought to.

David Gregory, you aren't fit to shine Walter Cronkite's funeral shoes.

Nice try, Tina Brown, but it ain't gonna happen

Yeah, I want a deck and a kitchen and a basement remodel and a Mini Clubman too, but it ain't gonna happen. Neither is Tina Brown's (and my) dream of Rachel Maddow taking over Tim Russert's old seat on Press the Meat:

One of the problems for NBC that was showcased during Russert’s media version of a state funeral in June is the way the chair of Meet the Press has become above all a Washington social and status position and only secondarily a journalistic assignment. Russert himself was not a journalist. He came from politics. His interviews either promoted his subjects or subjected them to opposition research. He was the Wash

Russert’s key gotcha device was to produce those laborious read-along quotes chosen to expose the hypocrisy or flip-flopping of whoever was in the hot seat. But did these quotes ever elicit interesting answers? They were always so long the interviewees had time to compose whole paragraph-long rebuttals from their store of mental talking points. Brokaw hasn’t retired this device but the next incumbent should.

NBC seems to be paralyzed by the sense that whomever they chose has to be another Russert. Not so. Russert defined an era, but that era is over. It’s as if in the months since he died the hands of the clock have spun with accelerated speed, leaving us all with a desire for reinvention. There's been an Obama effect in every sphere of business from General Motors to network TV.

Meet the Press has to change not just the host but the show itself. It may be successful now, but the winds of change could suddenly engulf it as they have the giants of print.ington élite’s staff man, stoking their prejudices, whims, and attitudes. His regular-guy persona flattered the élite by making them imagine they were regular guys too.

[snip]

Since NBC has not heeded my last suggestion to appoint either the unsung cable Rottweiler Greta Van Susteren or a reinvented, post-Palin Katie Couric, I say give Meet the Press to Rachel Maddow. She’s smart. She’s quick. She’s witty. She does her homework. And she listens to what the person she’s talking to is saying. She doesn't just go to the next question on her list.

If Obama is post-racial, Maddow is post-gender—divested of hair-frosted femininity in the anchor genre and more appealing because of it. Like him, she’s a calm, unflappable new era phenomenon. Sure, she’s a lefty, and in the past week she's been swinging away at Obama's cabinet choices, but I suspect she's ambitious enough to dial it back if she had to. (She also has that weird TV gene that’s so hungry for air time she’d probably insist on keeping her five-day job at MSNBC. Russert himself was on every show except Project Runway.)

Shorter Tina Brown: Tim Russert was the biggest tool in television news-o-tainment.

All this is true, of course, but it's preposterous to think that the General Electric network is going to give a gay leftist its marquee Sunday gasbag show. Of course I would be happy to have Rachel Maddow on 24 x 7, but that's not going to happen. Having someone moderate this show who isn't part of the Washington Village, who is going to have people on the panel other than Republican-leaning hacks who have never once in the last eight years been right about anything at all is change that the suits at NBC just aren't going to believe in.

So instead it looks like they are replacing one tool with another, and giving the Russert Seat at NBC to David Gregory. Yes, old "Stretch" himself, who thinks that asking George W. Bush a couple of tough questions over eight years somehow absolves him of this:

New boss, old boss, etc.

Because everything is good news for John McCain and bad news for Barack Obama

Would somebody please put David Gregory back out on the dance floor with Karl Rove where he belongs and put Rachel Maddow in that 6 PM slot?

Gregory:

Welcome to Race for the White House on a busy Friday. I'm David Gregory -- happy to have you here. It's your stop for the fast pace, the bottom line, and every point of view in the room. Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome? Will Edwards appear at the Democratic convention? All of that ahead.

"Another skeleton in the closet?" Uh...is there anyone anywhere in the country who has not yet heard by now that John Edwards has an affair? I hate to tell you this, Dave, but it's not in the closet anymore.

And are you SURE you want to talk about closets in the context of Democrats?

Because two can play this game:

Larry Craig:

South Carolina Sen. and McCain lackey Lindsey Graham.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist:

Former Florida state representative Bob Allen.

California Congressman David Dreier.

Do I need to go on?

And why should John Edwards' infidelity hurt Barack Obama, when John McCain's infidelity seems to be off-limits to John McCain's own candidacy? Forget for a moment about Vicki Iseman (who seems to have been disappeared since the story about her alleged romantic relationship with John McCain appeared in the New York Times), though if simple denial of an affair sufficed for John McCain it should have sufficed for Edwards, especially since no one followed up to determine if there was an affair, certainly not the National Enquirer. I'm talking about John McCain's adultery with Cindy Hensley when he was married to his first wife, Carol Shepp, whom he had decided was no longer attractive. But of course in Republican-land, as long as you marry your mistress and your ex-wife keeps her mouth shut, it's all perfectly OK.

I'm not defending infidelity here, not Edwards' nor McCain's nor anyone else's. Cheating is about the most hurtful thing you can do to a spouse, and frankly, if you want nookie elsewhere, at least have the decency to get a divorce BEFORE dipping your wick elsewhere so that at least your spouse is spared that humiliation and is playing on an even playing field where SHE can find someone else too. But when you have a Republican NOMINEE, not someone who dropped out months ago, about whom similar rumors were swirling not that long ago, and who is married to the woman with whom he cheated on his first wife, and who represents the so-called "family values", "sanctity of marriage" party, it seems to me that trying to pin John Edwards' adultery on Barack Obama is a stretch. Or a Stretch, since we're talking about David Gregory.

But given how David Gregory, like just about everyone else in the media, is so firmly in the tank for McCain, and how he's bound and determined to play the guilt-by-association game, let's send him back where he belongs -- at teh Starlight Lounge, dancing cheek-to-cheek with his best buddy, Karl Rove: