Krugman slams whore journalists who repeat the "bipartisan scandal" meme

Krugman channels the on-book-leave Frank Rich today, slamming the irresponsibility of media whores like Deborah Howell and Katie Couric who insist on repeating the FALSE meme that Jack Abramoff gave to both parties:

How does one report the facts," asked Rob Corddry on "The Daily Show," "when the facts themselves are biased?" He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that "facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda," and therefore can't be reported.

Mr. Corddry's parody of journalists who believe they must be "balanced" even when the truth isn't balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as "bipartisan."

Let's review who Mr. Abramoff is and what he did.

Here's how a 2004 Washington Post article described Mr. Abramoff's background: "Abramoff's conservative-movement credentials date back more than two decades to his days as a national leader of the College Republicans." In the 1990's, reports the article, he found his "niche" as a lobbyist "with entree to the conservatives who were taking control of Congress. He enjoys a close bond with [Tom] DeLay."

Mr. Abramoff hit the jackpot after Republicans took control of the White House as well as Congress. He persuaded several Indian tribes with gambling interests that they needed to pay vast sums for his services and those of Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide. From the same Washington Post article: "Under Abramoff's guidance, the four tribes ... have also become major political donors. They have loosened their traditional ties to the Democratic Party, giving Republicans two-thirds of the $2.9 million they have donated to federal candidates since 2001, records show."

So Mr. Abramoff is a movement conservative whose lobbying career was based on his connections with other movement conservatives. His big coup was persuading gullible Indian tribes to hire him as an adviser; his advice was to give less money to Democrats and more to Republicans. There's nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican connections.

Yet over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the "Today" show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats. But in each case they claimed that this is only a technical point, because Mr. Abramoff's clients — those Indian tribes — gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans, money the news organizations say he "directed" to Democrats.

But the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. A study commissioned by The American Prospect shows that the tribes' donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word "directed," Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them.

True, some Democrats who received tribal donations before Mr. Abramoff's entrance continued to receive donations after his arrival. How, exactly, does this implicate them in Mr. Abramoff's machinations? Bear in mind that no Democrat has been indicted or is rumored to be facing indictment in the Abramoff scandal, nor has any Democrat been credibly accused of doing Mr. Abramoff questionable favors.

[snip]

...the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade

It's interesting that the so-called journalists who are repeating this meme are perfectly willing to either be known as blatant shills for Republican corruption, or else too stupid to understand the difference between legal campaign contributions and illegal ones -- and too lazy to explain said difference to their audiences.

It was an ominous development when we found out that people were getting their news from The Daily Show -- not because Jon Stewart's program is a bad program, or even misinformative, but because even with Stewart's disclaimer that TDS is a fake news show, people still believe it's real. It's an even more ominous development that the terminology of fake journalism -- "fact-esque", "truthiness" and "biased facts" -- have become the Holy Trinity of mainstream news reporting.

So much for "going after the people who attacked us on 9/11"

We already know about how the Bush Administration let Osama Bin Laden get away in Tora Bora. But today we're finding out that in December 2001, OBL's right-hand man, Abdallah Tabarak, was captured, held at Guantanamo Bay for three years, then released:

For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.

During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction.

Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him. Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.

Today, the al Qaeda loyalist known locally as the "emir" of Guantanamo walks the streets of his old neighborhood near Casablanca, more or less a free man. In a decision that neither the Pentagon nor Moroccan officials will explain publicly, Tabarak was transferred to Morocco in August 2004 and released from police custody four months later.

Tabarak's odyssey from Afghanistan to Guantanamo and back to his native land illustrates the grit and at times fanatical determination of one bin Laden recruit. Yet his story also shows how little is known publicly about al Qaeda figures who were captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Major gaps remain in his account, and terrorism experts and intelligence officials continue to debate whether he was a member of al Qaeda's inner circle or its rank and file.

His case also highlights mysteries of U.S. priorities in deciding who to keep and who to let go. As the Pentagon gears up to hold its first military tribunals at Guantanamo after four years of preparations, it has released a prisoner it called a key operative. At the same time, it retains under heavy guard men whose background and significance are never discussed.

[snip]

A review of Moroccan court documents, including records of his interrogations by Moroccan investigators, shows the U.S. military had good reason to consider Tabarak a valuable catch. In addition to his firsthand knowledge of how bin Laden survived Tora Bora, he had worked for the al Qaeda leader since 1989 and was often at his side as he built the terrorist network from bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan.

According to the documents, details of which other foreign intelligence officials confirmed, Tabarak served as a jack-of-all-trades for members of the inner circle. For several years, he received his orders and a regular salary from Saeed Masri, an al Qaeda financier, military training camp leader and relative of bin Laden.

We invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, toppled a leader who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and then we allow the so-called mastermind behind the attacks to get away and release his right-hand man?

What do Al Qaeda leaders know about this Administration, or what is their relationship with the Bushies, that real Al Qaeda are treated so cavalierly while completely unrelated people are held indefinitely?

(An aside: Is anyone actually planning to watch the movie about Flight 93 that's running tonight on A&E? Just the radio spots are making me cringe. Why on earth would anyone want to watch a speculative re-creation of the last minutes of the flight as evening entertainment?)

Who said the blogosphere is homogeneous?

John Aravosis makes a pretty good case against the way the filibuster against Strip Search Sammy the Stem Cell Alito is going.

I haven't beaten the filibuster drum here all that much because the words of Oscar Wilde keep coming to mind: "There are two tragedies in life: One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it."

I agree with John that a well-organized filibuster which communicates to the American people the danger of this nominee, and gets them on board, is an effective technique. This particular effort, about which even those Democrats who have agreed to aren't enthusiastic (I'm talking to you, Sen. Obama), is going to fail, and it is going to reinforce the idea of the Democrats as an ineffective party.

I also agree that John Kerry's sudden enthusiasm for the netroots is less a function of a true belief in the danger of a Supreme Court nominee who believes that a president is a king, and more a function of trying to get a database of names for his next presidential run. Kerry can talk about a filibuster all he wants, he's a day late and a dollar short, and as I've said before, if he'd done his fucking job as a candidate, and NOT allowed the Swiftboat liars to smear him without a response, and NOT tried to look like the blue collar tough guy he isn't, and if he hadn't tried to finesse every goddamn issue until even I didn't know where the hell he stood on anything, we wouldn't even have to talk about a filibuster. So if Kerry thinks he can undo that damage now and I'll slap a Kerry sticker on my car in 2008, he'd better guess again.

Sam Alito, or someone like him, was a foregone conclusion when John Kerry took his $14 million of leftover campaign money and left Ohio, while his running mate was still telling supporters that the ticket would not give up until every vote was counted.

George W. Bush is never going to name a consensus nominee, and Capitol Hill Republicans aren't going to make him. He may have a 36% approval rating, but he he thinks he's the King of America, and he's going to continue to behave like one until he either leaves the White House in 2008 or cancels the election. If the Alito filibuster should by some miracle be successful, then we'll get Janice Rogers Brown, and then there's NO chance of a filibuster, because the Mighty Wurlitzer is already warmed up and ready to brand the Democrats as the party of racists and misogynists.

The time for hue and cry was November 2004.

John's bottom line, and I concur:

But, you need to recognize that those are not the only two options available to us. There's a third. Destroy the Senate Democrats who did nothing to launch a REAL campaign to convince the American people that Alito must be defeated. Destroy the traditional non-profit advocacy groups who took our millions of dollars and did NOTHING to launch a real campaign to win the public to our side. And go after the rich donors who continue to enable these failed Democratic politicians and these failed advocacy groups like some addict who only needs one more fix, then promises he'll get better. If we do not go after them, if we do not force them to change or get out of the way, the same problem, the same failure, the same ineffectiveness will continue to plague our party and our movement, with no change in sight.

We have a choice. We have the ability to make change in our party. We have the power to make the Democrats stand up and fight like real Americans for real principles in a way that shows how fierce and tough and committed we can be.

I'm not convinced that we have the time or the ability to do this before the Bush unholy combination of fascism and royalism comes to pass and we no longer have choices because we are At War In Perpetuity. But if you aren't as much of a pessimist as I am, and if you believe that we will continue to have elections that aren't completely rigged, the fact of the matter is that the Old Guard of the Democratic Party must go. This means John Kerry and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and every pussy-ass Democrat who is content to nibble table scraps from the corporate table as long as it means re-election must be dumped from office as quickly as possible, replaced by candidates who fight for Americans, not corporations. We want elected representatives who can clearly articulate why progressive values are the values Americans want, and who can remind them that the things they take for granted as emblematic of the good life in this country were all progressive initiatives -- public education, clean water, clean air, public transportation, Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, voting rights -- all progressive triumphs.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a Texas Democrat who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though he knew it meant losing the South BECAUSE IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO FOR AMERICA. When was the last time you saw a Democratic presidential candidate with that kind of courage? I'll tell you when: It was early 2004, and the candidate was named Howard Dean, and the campaigns of John Kerry and Dick Gephardt got together and ran negative ads in Iowa that worked. Then John Kerry left his testicles in Des Moines and now he thinks he can go through the motions of filibustering Alito and it makes everything OK.

It doesn't.

I don't oppose the filibuster with the vehemence that John does. I think that doing SOMETHING, even if ineffective, may be necessary at this point, not to keep the netroots supporting this old guard of political hacks, but to make SOME kind of stand against this spoiled brat of a president who's used to getting his own way. And if by some miracle the filibuster is effective, then this party has to get its ass in gear immediately and educate the American public about what the Unitary Executive theory is and why it's so dangerous to everything this country stands for.

I just don't have a whole lot of faith that this bunch can do it.

A terrible price

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had a rollicking good time poking gentle jibes at new ABC Nightly News anchor Bob Woodruff. As recently as last week, Stephen Colbert was inquiring of NBC correspondent David Gregory whether Woodruff was an anchor-bot.

No one is going to be laughing now, as it seems Woodruff has paid a terrible price for the pursuit of journalistic cred:

The new co-anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight", Bob Woodruff, was seriously wounded with his cameraman in Iraq today when the military convoy they were traveling with was struck by a roadside bomb, the network announced.

Mr. Woodruff and the cameraman, Douglas Vogt, were assigned to cover an American military unit in Taji, near Baghdad, but they were actually traveling with an Iraqi unit on patrol when the blast occurred. The two journalists were reported to have severe wounds and were being treated at an American military hospital in Iraq.

ABC's White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, said this morning on the network's "This Week" program that the two journalists were in the convoy as part of their assignment to report on the activities of the Fourth Infantry Division. They had originally been in an American armored Humvee truck, but decided to switch to a more lightly protected Iraqi vehicle to travel with and observe Iraqi forces that the American military is training.

[snip]

She [Martha Radditz] said that both men were wearing protective body armor, helmets and eye protection but that they had nonetheless sustained severe shrapnel wounds, some of them to the head. She did not mention whether any of the Iraqi soldiers were injured or killed.

Both Americans were quickly evacuated by helicopter to Balad, north of Baghdad, where they underwent surgery at an American hospital, she said.

Initial reports said that they hit an improvised explosive device, or a homemade roadside bomb, which was followed up by small-arms fire.

"This is very common over there now," Ms. Raddatz said. "These attacks are planned, and this is a secondary attack. Sometimes when medical personnel come in, they'll have small-arms fire following up on that."

This is the kind of thing that our troops have to face every single day they are in Iraq, with no end in sight.

Our thoughts today are with the Woodruff family -- and the families of ALL the American men and women who face this worry every day as this war with no point and no end drags on and on.

Getting in touch with my inner 25-year-old

Yes, I know full well that most young people these days regard baby boomers as Demons Incarnate. We are responsible for all the evil in the world, we've all sold out, we elected George W. Bush (WE didn't, THEY did -- and so did their grandparents), we crucified Jesus, we kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. If you're a Jewish baby boomer, you get double the guilt for your money.

Because I don't have children, I have been able to delude myself for a long time that I am still cool. And there are people who allow me to continue that delusion -- my Gen-X friends at Cinemarati, who, like the anti-Semites I went to college with, insist that they don't mean ME when they talk about Evil Boomers; the kids at the gas station who are amused because I am this short, middle-aged woman pumping her own gas in the last full-serve state in the country; and I would dare say most of the people who read this blog.

I'm not a complete idiot, though. I look in the mirror every day and wonder who that person with the encroaching jowls is. Then I get in the car, pop in something like Nimrod and sing "Minority" at the top of my lungs all the way to work and try not to think about it.

In short, I am one of those insufferable middle-aged assholes that Ameriprise is targeting with their awful commercials that make even me want to put my fist through the TV.

So when a Real And Actual Young Person thinks enough of this here blog to blogroll me, it allows me a few minutes of believing that even if I am not Still Cool, I am at least the Wise Old Tribal Elder surrounded by wide-eyed young people hoping to learn from my vast experience.

I don't add people to the blogroll very often, and when I do, it's usually serious blogs dealing with the Major Issues Of Our Time. But this morning, while sighing over yesterday's diminished traffic because the New York Times seems to have gotten wise to me, I found a referral from leftygrrrl and decided to take a look. And I read her entire first page. Leftygrrrl is, apparently, a coffee bar barista with some political awareness. Those of us who are still lucky enough to work in professional jobs really don't have any idea what it's like to be 25 in the job market of the Bush years. I think it's good for us to take a peek into that world, and so I'm adding leftygrrl to our blogroll today.

Swell. Another voice claiming you can't be healthy if you're not a size 4

I'm what's known in this country as overweight. I've tried mightily my whole life not to be overweight, with limited success. The only time in my life that I've had what the actuarial charts call a healthy weight was for about five minutes back in 1983, when I went on the Cambridge Diet, took aerobics five nights a week, weighed 105, and was absolutely miserable. I met Mr. Brilliant at that time, and I would sit in restaurants with him and cry because I was so hungry but I was afraid to eat because I might gain weight.

But that is how the "experts" would have me live.

I don't smoke. I don't drink. I don't take drugs. I do a healthy mix of cardio and weight training workouts 4-5 mornings a week. I've taken exactly four sick days in five years. My blood pressure averages around 120/70, except just after we return from Jamaica, where the food is salty. These days I have a tendency towards elevated cholesterol, but if I stay away from trans fats for a few weeks, that seems to take care of itself.

And I'm overweight.

My mother is 78, overweight, a lung cancer survivor, and still smoking. My father is 80, overweight, and healthy.

We come from a long line of Russian and Polish peasants, and this is how we are built.

I have slim friends who are on blood pressure medication, asthma inhalers, migraine medications, statins, and any number of pills for any number of ailments.

I take a Benadryl most days, occasionally I take Advil, but that's the extent of my medications most of the time, other than a multivitamin and a calcium supplement.

But I'm overweight. I'm preposterously healthy, but I'm overweight. The government says people like me cannot exist. Yet here I am.

Nick Kristof today takes up Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's obesity drumbeat.

In 2003, Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, learned he had type 2 diabetes.

His doctor told him he would probably be dead in 10 years — and that terrified him enough to start exercising, eschew sugar and lose about 110 pounds (at 5 feet 11 inches, he's now 180 pounds). His first attempts at jogging left him dizzy after a few hundred yards, but now he is running marathons.

That would be a nice, inspiring tale if it ended there, but instead it has been the starting point. Mr. Huckabee has become a health care policy wonk, and with the help of national experts he has begun a series of clever initiatives to fight obesity. They are among the most creative steps under way in America at any level of the political process.

Arkansas has become a national laboratory for using policy levers to try to encourage healthier lifestyles. Other states and the federal government should adopt the same steps — like curbing soft drinks in schools, informing all parents of their children's body mass index as a step to encouraging fitness, giving exercise breaks as well as smoking breaks, paying for preventive health checks like mammograms and prostate examinations, subsidizing efforts to quit smoking and seeking to give food stamps more purchasing power when they are used to buy fruits or vegetables.

I know all this sounds banal. Perhaps I should be using this journalistic real estate to thunder about grand issues like the Iraq war or Middle East peace or corruption in Congress. But remember that fat kills far more Americans than terrorists. Indeed, The New England Journal of Medicine reported last year that because of rising obesity, life expectancy in the U.S. might soon stop rising and could drop.

[snip]

"I don't want to be the sugar sheriff," Mr. Huckabee explained in an interview in his office. "I don't want to be the grease police. That's not my job. But when I look at our state budget, and I see that every year our Medicaid budget is increasing by 9 to 10 percent, and I look at state employees' health plans and I see that those costs are escalating at double digits and twice the rate of inflation — as a fiscal manager, I have not only the right but frankly also the responsibility to see what can we do to improve this bottom-line cost."

Repeatedly, Mr. Huckabee came back to the same argument: Obesity is reducing not only the quality of life of Americans, but also the fiscal soundness of our government and the competitiveness of our businesses.

Heh. Now that's the rub -- the cost to business.

I'm not claiming that obesity isn't a problem. I'd love to lose about 30 pounds. But when I already live a reasonably healthy lifestyle, I don't eat fast food and don't eat sugary sodas, how realistic is that? Like Oscar Wilde and the curtains, I've been fighting a battle with my weight my whole life, and my weight wins every damn time. My fat loves me as much as does my cat Maggie, who similarly wants to be plastered to my hip 24 x 7. It doesn't want to leave.

That said, I realize that I'm the exception rather than the rule. I work out regularly because I enjoy working out at home, alone, and I've found a video series that I like and that I can stick with. Most people need the motivation of a trainer or a group -- but what overweight person has the guts to huff and puff through a workout class full of marathon runners? Still, I would say that unhealthy lifestyles, rather than strictly obesity, is the real culprit. Usually the kind of sedentary life and high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar eating habits so many Americans have result in obesity. But I would guess that there are plenty of size sixteens eating fresh fruits and vegetables and lean meats and fish, and plenty of size fours chowing down Egg McMuffins for breakfast every day and able to demolish a fat panini sandwich at lunch -- then go home and eat dinner. I know they're out there, I work with one of them.

All too often, obesity is blamed on sheer gluttony -- and yet we live in a society that says, "Eat, eat, eat -- but don't you dare get fat." Restaurant portions are ridiculous. I usually eyeball my plate the minute it's put in front of me and mentally partition off the part I'm going to eat and the half to 2/3 of it I'm going to take home. But frankly, I'd just as soon pay five bucks less for the plate and not have to do this.

Food is plentiful, available, and cheap; and in busy households it's all too easy to just go through the drive-thru on the way home than to go home and cook a meal. Children's diets go from milk or formula, to commercial baby foods, to fast food. No wonder they won't eat broccoli -- they never learned what real broccoli tastes like because everything they've put in their mouths since the day they were weaned was produced by some big food processing company.

Parents put their kids in complete body armor before letting them ride a bicycle up to the corner, but they pump chemicals and fat and salt into their kids night after night by feeding them fast food. It's not that they don't care, and it's not that they don't WANT their kids to eat right; they're just too damn busy to start chopping vegetables after working all day, and they can't cook a meal and work on the kind of "family homework" that schools parcel out these days.

Ever tried to shop looking at labels? Especially when you're in a hurry? If you want to stay away from partially hydrogenated oils and trans fats and high fructose corn syrup, you can forget about buying anything that might mean you could get out of the kitchen before eight o'clock at night.

What worries me about columns like Kristof's, and the series likely to follow, is that they focus on weight itself, rather than the overall health of the population. If you tell a parent who's up at 5 AM, gets the kids ready for school, is on the train by 7, works all day, gets home at 6:30 and then has to help kids with homework, get them fed and ready for bed before collapsing in an exhausted heap that she should make time to get to a gym, she's going to head right to the A&P for a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Yes, Frankenfood is a problem. High-fructose corn syrup is a huge problem. Lack of exercise is a problem. But the bigger problem is what we as a society can do to give Americans the breathing room they need in an average day to plan and prepare healthier meals, to get out for that brisk walk, to learn to savor the fresh produce that's better for them than the processed crap they eat now. But instead we have a government that's completely in the pockets of the very food companies which perpetuate the problem, and a president who praises a mother working three jobs as "uniquely American" instead of realizing the strain that three jobs puts on family life. You can bet that mother is a regular patron of the drive-thru, and you can also bet that the closest she gets to the gym is the drive home from her third job.

A big change is coming to B@B

We've sold out!!

In the next day or two, you're going to see a big change here at B@B. For the first time, we will be accepting advertising.

Now don't all line up at once, but sometime very soon, perhaps even today, when you come here for the scintillating rants you've come to expect from B@B, you'll be surprised by a completely new design -- one which includes a prime location for your ad. So if you'd like to reach the growing audience of intelligent, witty, cultured, and just plain fabulous people who have made Brilliant at Breakfast part of their daily routine, watch for the appearance of the magic link where you can reach them.