Scott McClellan on the “liberal media”

In a minimally rational world, this extraordinary passage, from the new book by Scott McClellan, would forever slay the single most ludicrous myth in our political culture: The “Liberal Media”:

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

Just consider how remarkable that is. George Bush’s own Press Secretary criticizes the American media for being “too deferential” to the Government. He lays the blame for Bush’s ability to propagandize the nation on the media’s uncritical dissemination of the Republican administration’s falsehoods. And most notably of all, McClellan actually uses cynical scare quotes when invoking the phrase which, in conventional political discourse, is deemed the most unassailable truth of all: The Liberal Media.

How much longer can this preposterous myth be sustained when even the White House Spokesman not only mocks the phrase but derides the media for being “too deferential” to the right-wing Government “in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during [his] years in Washington”? If one were to set about with the goal of debunking the “Liberal Media” myth — as Eric Alterman specifically did four years ago and other media critics have more generally done before that — one couldn’t dream up evidence more conclusive than McClellan’s admissions.

Blindingly conclusive evidence which would — for any rational person — forever negate the “Liberal Media” myth has been piling up for years. The extraordinary (though woefully incomplete) 2004 mea culpa from The New York Times acknowledged that not just Judy Miller, but the paper as a whole, re-printed pro-war government claims that were “allowed to stand unchallenged.” The Washington Post’s own media critic, Howard Kurtz, documented that anti-war views were systematically buried at that paper. The NYT recently exposed that network and cable news shows for years continuously allowed Pentagon-controlled operatives to masquerade as “independent analysts” spouting the pro-government line with virtually no challenge. And the media’s pathological fixation on the Clinton sex scandals — which led to his impeachment — stood in stark contrast to the widespread indifference among the citizenry.

Beyond all that, are there any reporters left who deny that the campaign-covering media in 2000 was gushingly enamored of George Bush and oozing with contempt for Al Gore? Identically, their intense affection for John McCain is something they openly proclaim; as they shamelessly acknowledge, they’re his “base.” And while some journalists undoubtedly harbor admiration for Barack Obama, the non-stop coverage of one anti-Obama narrative after the next — Jeremiah Wright, lapel pins, patriotism “questions,” “Bittergate,” “problems” with Jewish and white voters — simply has no parallel in any coverage of McCain.

(Continue reading: Glen Greenwald-Salon.com)

Bush’s Commitment Problem

George Bush has a commitment problem. On his recent Middle East trip, he had to figure out how to demonstrate his loyalty to Israel and appear committed to peace and the Palestinians, all while rattling his saber at Iran for the sake of Israeli and American hawks. A good start to achieving one of those objectives, of course, was likening Barack Obama to the appeasers of Hitler and the Nazis in front of the Israeli Knesset.

According to the White House, Bush was in the region to “reaffirm efforts toward peace and prosperity and our close work with regional allies to combat terrorism and promote freedom.” For many who have watched as the administration has ratcheted up the aggressive rhetoric toward Iran, it is understood that the Bush administration is looking to “regional allies” for complicity on their plans for Iran.

Naturally, Bush was also there to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary and to note that “[e]leven minutes later [after independence], on the orders of President Harry Truman, the United States was proud to be the first nation to recognize Israel’s independence.” He went on to say, “And on this landmark anniversary, America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world.”

During this trip the president once again attempted to convince Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world is also the perfect third party to deliver an honest peace agreement between the two.

However, the Bush administration stacking the deck in favor of Israel isn’t exactly news to the Palestinians.

When Vice President Dick Cheney made an unexpected visit to Baghdad in March, that wasn’t the biggest surprise of his 10-day Middle East trip. More astounding was Cheney, arguably the sharpest-taloned hawk in the Bush administration’s war-hungry aerie, having been deployed to ostensibly do the work of diplomacy with Israelis and Palestinians. Cheney’s involvement in the so-called peace process is something of a cruel joke, despite White House claims that “he can certainly complement the kind of message that both the President and the Secretary [of State] have been consistently delivering to Israeli and Palestinian leaders about the depth of our commitment to try and make progress toward a Palestinian state.”

The real intentions of Cheney’s trip made the Palestinians the butt of the punch line. Although the vice president claimed that realizing a Palestinian state would require “painful concessions on both sides,” it was pretty clear Palestinians would have to endure the most pain when he told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at their March 22 meeting that “our two countries have been more than just strong allies. We’ve been friends—special friends—and our peoples bound together by unique ties of history, culture, religion, and memory. Today, both our nations share the ideals of liberty, equality, human dignity, and representative government.”

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

Paying for War at the Pump

What’s it got to do with the price of gas? Would some reporter with access to the Republican presidential candidate please ask John McCain why he wants to continue President Bush’s Mideast policy when it has proved so ruinous for American taxpayers? Because McCain is determined to ignore our economic meltdown and shift the debate to foreign policy, shouldn’t he have to explain why an open-ended military presence in the Mideast will make us economically and militarily more secure when the opposite is clearly the case?

Let’s not waste too much time on the military side of the equation. The argument that troops on the ground have made us militarily more secure is absurd on its face. American resources and lives have been squandered in an inane effort that McCain aptly criticized before becoming a presidential candidate. As a Senate watchdog, he distinguished himself by sharply denouncing one defense contractor boondoggle after another in cases involving hundreds of billions for modern weapons that had nothing to do with fighting cave-based terrorists. But as a presidential candidate, McCain now unabashedly apologizes for every twist of the downwind spiral of the Bush administration foreign policy, from wasteful weapons to inhuman torture.

McCain’s strategy is clearly that of distracting attention from the calamitous economy by sounding the demagogue’s alarm about enemies at the gate. This week, McCain again blasted Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the grounds that he underestimated the threat from Iran while ignoring the vast increase in Iran’s power—an increase actually resulting from Bush eliminating Iran’s only effective enemy, Saddam Hussein. The other winners in this folly have been the oil kingdoms that Hussein periodically threatened, led by the Saudi royal family. Seizing upon the opportunity presented by the 9/11 attacks, Bush knocked off not the Saudis, who had produced Osama bin Laden and 15 of his hijacker minions, but rather the royal family’s sworn enemy in Iraq, who had absolutely nothing do with 9/11.

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

Bush’s Attack Helps Obama

In the wake of George W. Bush’s thinly veiled attack on Barack Obama from Israel’s Knesset, in which the president aimed parallels between the appeasement of Nazi Germany and weakness on terror at the Illinois Senator, Democrats were enraged.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it, “beneath the dignity of office.” Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, never one to mince words, called it “bullsh*t.”

And while the Obama campaign expressed it’s own outrage, it may want to hold its fire: George Bush may have just given the Democrats enough ammunition to take the White House in November.

True, Bush’s comments were inflammatory. He raised the issue of Nazi Germany, mentioned the name of Adolph Hitler in- of all places- Israel. And while the setting and delivery might have come as somewhat of a shock to the political world, it’s substantively nothing new. In fact, a central focus of John McCain’s summer and fall campaign will be to paint Obama as being soft on terror. But the significance of Bush’s statements has less to do with what he said than it does with the fact that he said it at all.

In firing a salvo of his own, George W. Bush planted himself firmly in John McCain’s camp. Consider what kind of dead weight that is for the Arizona Senator: Bush’s approval rating stands at a paltry 27%. Essentially, the president put a target on McCain’s chest at which Obama can take aim.

(Continue reading: Eyes on Obama)

Biden calls Bush comments ‘bulls**t’

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, D-Delaware, called President Bush’s comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists “bulls**t” and said if the president disagrees so strongly with the idea of talking to Iran then he needs to fire his secretaries of State and Defense, both of whom Biden said have pushed to sit down with the Iranians.

“This is bullshit. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset…and make this kind of ridiculous statement,” Biden said angrily in a brief interview just off the Senate floor.

“He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.”

He quoted Gates saying Wednesday that we “need to figure out a way to develop some leverage and then sit down and talk with them.”

(Continue reading: CNN Political Ticker)

Poetry vs. fear

The Obama-McCain contest will hold up a mirror to America’s soul.

The coming presidential election will present America with the starkest political choice it has faced in a generation. On one side, we have Barack Obama — the first black candidate to make it to the finals, a staunch liberal who opposes the Bush administration’s Iraq war and its massive giveaway to the rich. On the other, we have John McCain, a onetime maverick who expeditiously crawled back into the far-right bosom of the GOP and is running as Son of Bush.

It’s the collision of an irresistible force with an immovable object. Obama, combined with Bush’s disastrous legacy, is the irresistible force. Obama is a consummately skilled and pragmatic politician who has inspired millions of young voters, owns the black vote, and has demonstrated he can appeal to independents and swing voters outside the traditional Democratic constituency. Forget the recent polls showing that some Hillary Clinton supporters won’t vote for him — once Clinton gracefully bows out of the race, her supporters will close ranks around Obama. Anyone who seriously thinks a significant number of them are going to vote for McCain is delusional. The Democrats will go into November united and energized.

And, of course, they will benefit enormously from the train-wreck presidency of George W. Bush. According to a CNN poll, Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history: a staggering 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how he is handling the job, the first time any president’s disapproval rating has reached into the 70s. Support for Bush’s signature achievement, the war in Iraq, is also at an all-time low, with 68 percent opposed to it. Things are no better for the Republicans on the domestic front, with voters battered by record-high gas prices and a tanking economy. On the issues, there is simply no ray of hope anywhere for the GOP.

(Continue reading: Salon.com)

Obama Lawyer: Bush Manipulating FEC For McCain

Obama counsel Bob Bauer, on his always-punchy personal blog, considers the newest appointments to the FEC and writes that the regulatory body is being put back together to exclude a Republican commissioner who had taken a critical stance toward McCain’s attempt to thread the needle on public financing.

In this one move, the White House ended McCain’s accountability for his use or abuse of the primary public financing system while putting him in position to take money for the general.

For this maneuver to have been arranged for the benefit of Senator McCain, of all people–the John McCain who has regularly, severely criticized the FEC as a “corrupt” agency–is a remarkable turn in his career as a reformer. A Commissioner who acted to enforce the law, to just raise an important question of enforcement, has been stripped of his post. This was clearly in Senator McCain’s interest, this raw power play. It is also in his interest to have the FEC, back in business minus Mason, arrange for his money for the fall campaign.

(Continue reading: POLITICO)

Mission Impossible

On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous stroll across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, The New York Times asked a group of “experts” how they would accomplish the mission in Iraq. Unfortunately, the newspaper turned to some of the same geniuses who thought the war was a good idea in the first place.

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

Bush Disapproval Rating Makes History

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey shows that 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president, the highest disapproval rating ever for a president since it began being tracked in the 1930s.

A new poll suggests that President Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president.

“No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

“Bush’s approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s,” Holland said. “The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952.”

While Gallup polling goes back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until the Truman years that they began surveying monthly approval ratings.

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, “He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974.”

President Nixon’s disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 66 percent.

(Continue reading: CNN-AOL News)

An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush’s lost e-mails

The case of the missing e-mail

A federal magistrate judge on Thursday chastised the Bush administration for failing to fully answer questions related to a long-running dispute over missing White House emails. The White House is facing lawsuits from two public interest groups, Citizens for Responsibilty and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, demanding that the White House restore the missing e-mails and put in place systems to prevent further e-mail losses. Administration officials were ordered to provide detailed information about the burdens involved in taking immediate actions to preserve copies of hard drive, tapes, and other media that may contain copies of the missing e-mails.

The ongoing dispute spotlights a part of the executive branch that doesn’t often get much attention: its e-mail system. Two laws govern the retention of executive branch documents. The Federal Record Act requires the head of each federal agency to ensure that documents related to that agency’s official business be preserved for federal archives. The Watergate-era Presidential Records Act augmented the FRA framework by specifically requiring the president to preserve documents related to the performance of his official duties. A 1993 court decision held that these laws applied to electronic records, including e-mails, which means that the president has an obligation to ensure that the e-mails of senior executive branch officials are preserved.

In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year’s court decision by rolling out an automated e-mail-archiving system to work with the Lotus-Notes-based e-mail software that was in use at the time. The system automatically categorized e-mails based on the requirements of the FRA and PRA, and it included safeguards to ensure that e-mails were not deliberately or unintentionally altered or deleted.

(Continue reading: ars technica)

Pentagon Suddenly Suspends Bush War Propaganda Investigation

The Pentagon announced on Friday that it was suspending its briefings for retired military officers who often appear as military analysts on television and radio programs.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said the briefings and all other interactions with the military analysts had been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that since 2002 the Pentagon has cultivated several dozen military analysts in a campaign to generate favorable coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The retired officers have made tens of thousands of appearances for television and radio networks, holding forth on Iraq, Afghanistan, detainee issues and terrorism in general.

Records and interviews show that the Bush administration worked to transform the analysts into an instrument intended to shape coverage from inside the major networks.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

The High Crimes of John Yoo

The President’s Executioner

The title of this article –The President’s Executioner –is a play on words. It refers to professor John Yoo, who teaches law at Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley. But this man –mild-mannered by all appearances –is not what he seems.

He is the man who was, more often than nearly any other, behind the White House decisions to violate the international laws of war. He was the one who told the White House how to get away with committing war crimes. While he may have been a henchman for others who instructed him to make the arguments he did, he repeatedly refused to reverse himself, both while he worked in the Department of Justice and after he left that office and returned to academia.

But it was also during this time period, as we now know, that the Department of Justice became “politicized.” Instead of executing the laws as it should have been doing, the Justice Department became an instrument of President Bush, executing his wishes. And John Yoo executed White House wishes to twist the law into something it was not and was not meant to be.

Yoo, however, did more than execute orders. The so-called “Torture Memos,” in the writing of which Yoo was an active and primary participant, opened the door to such abuse of the laws that some detainees were actually murdered. For all practical purposes, they were executed, without a trial or guilty verdict.

Thus, the President’s Executioner.

(Continue reading: CounterPunch)

The High Price of Diplomacy With China

Two investigative reports uncover the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress legal proceedings against high-ranking Chinese officials—former Trade Minister Bo Xilai and Beijing’s Olympic Organizing Committee President Liu Qi—accused of torturing religious group members.

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

In the

summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

The Torture Sessions

Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

(Continue reading: New York Times)