Michael Crowley illustrates, yet again, why The New Republic is beloved by the Right — eagerly currying favor with the Right is the magazine’s overarching, obsequious purpose — and has otherwise (with some rare exceptions) written itself into utter irrelevancy.  Crowley denies that the ugly, anti-Obama lynch mob rage characterizing McCain/Palin rallies is “unique” or “of alarming proportion,” and instead argues that Democrats are being hypocrites by objecting, because some people the left also said bad things about George Bush 2004:

Is the GOP Fury So Unique?

My friends and fellow prisoners, time for some straight talk: Politico has a good story today about Republican rage at the notion of an Obama presidency … . This is all nasty stuff.  is it really unprecedented? A pitchfork rebellion of alarming proportions? I’m not so sure. Around this time four years ago Democrats raged furiously against an illegitimate, lying “war criminal.” Indeed some even called Bush a terrorist.

Yes, there’s probably a nativist strain here that makes this uglier than anything we saw in ‘04… . But I haven’t seen many examples of overt racism beyond the smears we’ve seen for months. (Indeed as Noam notes below, race has been somewhat surprisingly absent from ths campaign so far.)

Unfortunately, to some degree this seems to be what happens in American politics nowadays when one side is losing. No one wants to accept the possibility that they’ve been outplayed fair and square.

Obviously, every political movement — every group of human beings — will attract some crazed, imbalanced individuals.  If all that were happening in this election were a few stray comments from the crowd or some anonymous Internet comments that were vicious or even overtly racist and violent, then Crowley’s point that there’s nothing unusual or particularly significant would at least be reasonable.   

But as anyone with eyes can see, that’s not what is happening — not even close.  Crowley’s characteristic TNR need to receive “even-liberal-TNR-admits” praise from the Right (and the head pats are piling up already) leads him to assert some plainly false and just morally perverse equivalencies. 

The mass accusations of “terrorist” and “Arab traitor” against Obama didn’t just get randomly blurted out by a few hard-core, isolated ideologues.  Rather, that is exactly the message being spewed systematically from McCain and Palin themselves (“pallin’ around with terrorists”), their parade of ads, and the coordinated efforts of opinion-leaders on the Right.  Even veteran campaign reporters for whom Balance is a religion have been acknowledging that the McCain/Palin rallies are unique in their mass-crowd vitriol and intense rage. 

Can Crowley point to a single statement or ad from John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004, or a single Kerry/Edwards rally, that is remotely comparable to any of this?  He doesn’t even bother to try, because in TNR World, it is an article of faith that “The Left” is always (at least) as bad as The Right — if one side does X, then it is necessarily true that the other side does it, too — and simply asserting an equivalency in each case is sufficient to achieve the purpose (to show “Balance” and attract the Right’s praise) and requires no evidence.

Much more revealingly, note that Crowley doesn’t even pretend to assess the validity or truth of the accusation he’s equating.  By 2004, George Bush (with TNR cheering him every step of the way) had attacked, invaded and virtually obliterated another country that hadn’t attacked us and couldn’t attack us, killing tens of thousands of innocent people (at least), all based on false pretenses.  He had locked up hundreds of people — including U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — and asserted the right to keep them in cages indefinitely without bothering to charge them or afford any process for contesting the accusations. 

We were subjecting helpless detainees, many of whom were innocent, to hideous treatment at Guantanamo, and photographs had surfaced showing that the U.S. military was imposing the most grotesque torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  If those aren’t war crimes, what is?  If that doesn’t make George Bush a “war criminal,” what would?  Crowley might want to read this:

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Given those facts, for Crowely to assert an equivalency between claims that George Bush is a “war criminal” or even a “terrorist” with the bile being spewed toward Barack Obama is perverse in the extreme.  But to Crowley, the conclusions of Gen. Taguba (“there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes”) is the equivalent of the lynch mob’s crusade against Obama because they both contain mean and aggressive accusations, so what’s the difference?

It’s certainly reasonable to object to the term “terrorist” as excessive or incendiary rhetoric when applied to Bush (particularly since that term is nothing more than a political tool and has no real, discernible meaning), but Crowley’s eagerness to equate accusations made against Obama with ones made against George Bush without any regard whatsoever to whether the accusations are true vividly illustrates the core sickness of the modern Beltway journalist:  namely, that balance renders truth irrelevant, and the desire to ingratiate oneself to the establishment outweighs all.  

Crowley — and all of his journalistic comrades — should immediately read the extraordinarily incisive speech given this week by McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief John Walcott when he accepted the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, an award received for McClatchy’s skeptical and aggressive investigative reporting scrutinizing the Bush administration’s pre-war Iraq claims (claims which TNR mindlessly ingested and vocally regurgitated):

Instead of being members of the Fourth Estate, too many Washington reporters have been itching to move up an estate or two, to become part of the Establishment or share in the good times. I.F. Stone, on the other hand, knew well that reporters, by definition, are outsiders. After Stone died, Pat Oliphant drew a marvelous cartoon of him standing at the gates of heaven, holding a pencil and a notebook. Like all great political cartoons, it says more than words ever could. St. Peter is on the phone to a Higher Authority, and he’s saying: “Yes, that I.F. Stone, Sir. He says he doesn’t want to come in — he’d rather hang around out here, and keep things honest.”

Being an outsider, a gadfly, a muckracker, isn’t always as much fun as being an insider, a celebrity journalist on TV and the lecture circuit. Worse, in these troubled economic times for the news media, it makes enemies, sometimes powerful ones, and it can offend readers, advertisers — and, as conditions in our business continue to worsen — potential employers in public relations and other industries… .

Relying on The Times, or McClatchy or any other news source, for all the truth is dumb, but it’s infinitely preferable to the pernicious philosophical notions that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is relative, or that, as some journalists seem to believe, it can be found midway between the two opposing poles of any argument… .

Does the truth lie halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or between communism and democracy? If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, must you then give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels? If you write an article that’s critical of John McCain, are you then obligated to devote an identical number of words to criticism of Barack Obama, and vice versa?  

I’m not one who believes — even with an election less than 30 days away — that liberal pundits should avoid making points that can be used by “the other side.”  Political writers aren’t and shouldn’t be campaign operatives, and their primary obligation should be to write the truth as they see it, even if that truth undermines “their side.”  

Crowley’s crime here isn’t that he undermined a pro-Obama talking point.  It’s that he reflexively asserted equivalencies where there plainly are none because that’s how journalists like him show how Fair, Objective and Reasonable they are (some people on the Left called Bush a terrorist so that makes these coordinated McCain/Palin Munich beer hall rallies unnotable).  Worst of all, he equated the two without even pretending to consider whether the two things he was equating were true or false.  That is why Crowley’s defense of the McCain mobs as nothing unusual is so typical, and so illustrative of the core corruption of our journalistic class.  The two sides are always the same, even when they’re not.

* * * * * * *

I was really sorry to read that Dean Barnett — formerly of Hugh Hewitt’s blog and now a Contributor at The Weekly Standard — is in ICU battling his latest and, by all appearances, most serious attack yet of cystic fibrosis.  Dean is one of those very rare advocates on the Right who, despite embracing deeply misguided political views, is almost uniformly honest in his writing and quite amiable in his personal interaction.  I developed somewhat of a friendship with Dean over the last couple of years by e-mail and appeared with him a few times when he guest-hosted The Hugh Hewitt Show, where we argued vigorously though constructively — the kind of political arguments I wish were more possible.   And I particularly respect the courageous way he talks candidly about his battles with cystic fibrosis, a truly awful and almost invariably fatal disease for which there is no cure.

Dean gave an interview just a few days ago to Pundit Fight, where he talked about numerous topics, including the exchanges he and I had.  Whatever you personally do to send someone best wishes would be well-deserved in Dean’s case.

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

As the Right increasingly (a) demands to hear more about Bill Ayers and Obama The Communist/Muslim Terrorist and (b) proclaims Sarah Palin to be the darling of the Regular American and the new right-wing superstar — claims that are converging in the traveling lynch mob tour known as the “McCain/Palin campaign” — two new polls, one from Newsweek and one from Fox (.pdf), conclusively demonstrate how out-of-touch and fringe the Right has become.   Both polls show that as the Right reveals its true Ayers-driven face to the nation, (a) Obama’s popularity holds steady while McCain and Palin’s plummets, and (b) Sarah Palin is a massive liability for the McCain campaign.  

The Newsweek poll shows Obama/Biden with a lead of 11 points (up from 4 points a month ago) and Fox shows Obama/Biden with a 7-point lead (they had McCain winning by 3 a month ago), but in terms of seeing what the right-wing movement in this country has become, how fringe and disconnected from reality they are, the more revealing facts are buried inside the poll numbers.

In the new Newsweek poll, taken over the last two days in the midst of the Ayers attacks, Obama now has a +24 favorability rating (60/36), which has improved from the +20 (57/37) he registered in last month’s poll.   In the new poll, McCain’s favorability rating is only +6 (51/45), which has worsened substantially since the +21 he registered last month (57/36).  The same has happened to Sarah Palin’s rating, which has dropped from +20 (52/32) in the prior month to a meager +4 now (49/45).

If anything, Americans see McCain — not Obama — as out-of-touch with their values, as 49% believe McCain does not share their values and only 47% believe he does.    By stark contrast, Americans overwhelmingly believe Obama shares their values (59-37%) (Newsweek, 12-14).  Americans also overwhelmingly believe that Obama would “fit well with people in your local community” (63-31%), while a much smaller margin (54-40%) says that about McCain (Newsweek 12, 14) .

Worse still (for the Right), a large majority — 55-39% — answer ”NO” when asked if Sarah Palin ”is qualified to step in as President if she had to” (Newsweek 14), whereas only 46% answered “NO” last month.  And 47% say that Hockey Mom Palin does not share their values, while only 48% say that Palin does (versus 59% who say that the Radical-Terrorist Obama shares their values) (Newsweek 14).  

Worse even still (for the Right), Americans say that Obama’s selection of Joe Biden makes them more likely to vote for Obama by a margin of 11% (34-23%), but say that McCain’s selection of Palin makes them less likely to vote for McCain by a margin of 8% (32-40%) (Fox 8-9).   And in the last month alone, the percent saying that McCain’s selection of Palin has made them less likely to vote for McCain has increased substantially (31% to 40%).

Even worse (for the Right), Obama the Terrorist now has the highest favorability rating of any of the four candidates (60%), while Palin the New Reagan Superstar has the lowest (47%).  And even Biden’s favorability rating (57%) is higher than McCain’s (53).  More revealingly, Palin has the highest unfavorability rating (42%), followed by McCain (40%), Obama (34%) and Biden (29%) (Fox 13-16).   

And in the last month — as the McCain/Palin campaign began spewing their bile — Obama’s favorability rating has increased (57% to 60%) while his unfavorability rating has declined (36% to 34%).  By contrast, McCain’s favorability/unfavorability ratings have plummeted during this same time (60/33 to 53/40), as has Palin’s (54/27 to 47/42).  Standing next to Sarah Palin in that debate has turned Joe Biden — Joe Biden — into a wildly popular politician in America, with a 57/29 favorability rating.

In sum, the more Americans see of and hear from Sarah Palin and are exposed to her filthy smear politics, the worse she looks to them.  And the more the McCain/Palin campaign attacks Obama with ugly, despicable smears, the worse McCain/Palin look, while Obama’s popularity with Americans continues to solidify and even gradually increase (Americans believe Obama is “trustworthy” by an overwhelming margin of 60-32%) (Fox 36).

And perhaps most damning of all for the McCain campaign, when asked which campaign has been “too negative or nasty,” Americans choose the McCain/Palin campaign by an overwhelming margin (39-10%) (Newsweek 17) — by far the most lopsided margin for that question over the last eight years (by comparison, both the Democratic and GOP campaigns of 2000 and 2004 registered no more than 24% on that question and each side received roughly equal ratings).  Fox specifically asked if the “Obama-Ayers connection” would make Americans less likely to vote for Obama, and Americans resoundingly answered NO (32-61%), and — as Greg Sargent notes — since GOP voters overwhelmingly answered “YES” to that question, and would not have voted for Obama anyway, the Ayers issue, even when Fox asked about it directly, has almost no effect.

Unsurprisingly, then, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the McCain/Palin ads are “too negative” (56-41%) and “misleading and distorting” (58-37%), while Americans overwhelmingly believe that the Obama/Biden ads are neither too negative (29-68%) nor misleading and distorting (36-57%) (Newsweek 23-24).  Americans believe Obama/Biden is running a “positive” rather than “negative” campaign (56-21%), but believe the opposite about McCain/Palin by an almost equal margin (27-51%) (Fox 38).

Having McCain and Palin run around the country stoking right-wing fury and unmasking their movement for all to see is backfiring in the extreme.   What is more likely than anything else to lead to a sure Obama victory — by landslide — is if the McCain/Palin campaign continues to cater itself to the desires and advice of the National Review/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity mentality, which believes that Sarah Palin is a huge political asset among Normal Americans (Free Sarah Palin!) and that if Americans just keep hearing more and more and more about what a Terrorist-loving Muslim-Communist-radical Barack Hussein Obama is (ACORN!!), then  … any day now!  …  Americans are going to decide that they want the same twisted, bloated faction that has run our country into the ground for the last eight years to continue to rule. 

The Limbaugh/Fox News/Bill Kristol/National Review Right is a faction in desperate need of collective death as a movement.  And it will be particularly appropriate if the final blow is delivered by their own malicious, hate-mongering hand.

 

UPDATE: Two follow-ups to two posts here from this week:

(1) After the criticism here of The Washington Post’s Dan Balz yesterday for his misleadingly even-handed treatment of “character attacks” in the campaign, Balz wrote a much better and more honest article today, in which he makes clear that there is no comparison and states:

I wrote yesterday about the risks to both McCain and Obama — and the country — as they fire at one another in increasingly sharp terms. The danger is that the winner will come to office with a sizable portion of the population poisoned by the effects of the campaign.

But what’s also clear is that McCain’s tactics are over the line, with no restraint in sight, and threaten to provoke reactions among partisans on both sides that will continue to escalate.

I don’t know if there’s any causation between the criticism and his behavioral change, but it’s welcomed either way.

(2)  When I wrote earlier this week about Sean Hannity’s promotion of and reliance on one of the nation’s most virulent anti-semites, ”Andy Martin,” I noted that the ADL had, extraordinarily, said nothing to condemn Hannity for that behavior.  Today, they issued a letter to Hannity doing exactly that.  That should be useful:  ADL condemns Sean Hannity and Fox News for their reliance on “a man with an extensive track record of making anti-Semitic and anti-Israel remarks” in a program attacking Barack Obama.  I wonder what South Florida voters would think about that.

 

UPDATE II: The McCain campaign is obviously reading the same polls and reaching the same conclusions.  Read Ana Marie Cox’s amazing account of how McCain — after stoking these sentiments for more than a week — suddenly and repeatedly tried to restrain and even admonish today’s lynch mob in Minnesota (h/t Andrew Sullivan).  But look at what the crowd is saying in their questions to McCain as a result of what the McCain/Palin campaign has done (“I’m scared of Barack Obama… he’s an Arab …”).  McCain repeatedly interrupted questions like this to say that Obama is a “decent family man” and to insist that disagreements with Obama be “respectful,” and Cox — an unrepentant, tire-swinging McCain lover if ever there was one — generously says:  “I think [McCain] means it.”

Right.  He spent the last seven days whipping up the Right in this country into an unprecedentedly ugly frenzy, and just as polls show that he is falling further behind and the tactics are backfiring (and as the former GOP Michigan Governor and long-time McCain supporter condemns McCain for these tactics and William F. Buckley’s Republican son endorses Obama, citing his radically changed behavior and his choice of Palin), McCain abruptly and flamboyantly condemns such sentiments.  Whatever else that is, genuine isn’t it.

 

UPDATE III: Or, as Nate Silver — after surveying the latest polls today like only he can — puts it:

With 25 days to go until the election, Barack Obama is presently at his all-time highs in four of the six national tracking polls (Research 2000, Battleground, Hotline and Zogby) and is just one point off his high in Gallup. He has emerged with clear leads in both Florida and Ohio, where there are several polls out today. He is blowing McCain out in most polls of Pennsylvania and Michigan, and is making states like West Virgina and Georgia competitive.

Screaming “AYERS!” and “ACORN!” just a few more times will change all of that any minute now.

 

UPDATE IV: Here is the video of McCain today, trying to undo what he and Sarah Palin have spent the last couple of weeks purposely unleashing:

 

Since 2002 — for 6 years now — the U.S. has been detaining 17 human beings in Guantanamo of Chinese Uighur descent who everyone, including even the U.S. Government, acknowledges are not “enemy combatants” and never took up arms against the U.S.  The Pentagon long ago cleared the detainees for release but has nonetheless continued to detain them because no country in the world is willing to accept them due to a fear of alienating the Chinese Government (which persecutes the Uighurs).  

Last week, a federal district court judge — in a stinging and eloquent ruling delivered orally (.pdf — beginning on p. 28) — finally ordered the Bush administration to release these detainees and allow them access to the U.S.  The Bush administration has appealed the ruling and, for the moment, the Court of Appeals has stayed the lower court’s order pending appellate review.

Today on Salon Radio, I speak with the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz about this ruling and the plight of the Uighurs.  We also discuss Hafetz’s client, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the Qatar citizen who, in 2001, was in the U.S. legally, on a student visa, living in Peoria, Illinois with his wife and five children, when he was arrested, charged with crimes that he vehemently denied, and then — a month before his trial was to begin — was declared by George Bush to be an “enemy combatant,” had his trial cancelled, and was ordered into military custody, where he has remained — in a South Carolina brig — for years with no trial.  I wrote about the al-Marri case here, and the latest ruling, likely to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in the next term, here.  That case will determine — literally — whether the President has the right to declare U.S. citizens on U.S. soil to be “enemy combatants” and imprisoned with no trial.

Our discussion is roughly 30 minutes long and can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below.  A transcript will be posted shortly.

(updated below - Update II)

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has an article today perfectly illustrating how the modern journalist’s conception of “balance” leads them to distort the truth.  Balz’s article is about the increasing use of “character attacks” in the presidential race, and rather than state the truth — that the McCain/Palin ticket is now relying almost exclusively on some of the ugliest and most outright dangerous character smears seen in a modern presidential election — Balz instead pretends that this is a phenomenon of which both sides are guilty in equal measure:

At a time when the nation needs inspiration and confidence-building, the two candidates running for president are trying to ensure that whoever ends up winning next month will be seen as unfit by a sizable portion of the population.

To see the two candidates in a pair of appearances here in Ohio over the past two days is to see John McCain and Barack Obama attacking each other not just because of their different visions and prescriptions for the problems the country is now facing, but going straight at each other over character, fitness and behavior.

Has Balz bothered to watch the news for the last week?  The rallies at John McCain and Sarah Palin’s events are rabid, drooling lynch mobs spouting the most vile and extreme accusations against Barack Obama personally that can be imagined.  Here is what the AP report of the McCain/Palin event today in Ohio describes — now a regular, daily feature of their events:

“We’ve all heard what he’s said. But it’s less clear what he’s done, or what he will do,” McCain told supporters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

McCain’s remarks about Obama were interrupted with shouts of “socialist,” “terrorist” and “liar.”

Just look at the videotapes of the angry, hateful hordes attending these rallies — screaming that Obama is a socialist; that he’s both a Muslim and a terrorist as proven by his “bloodline” and his name; that his supporters are “commie faggots”; that he’s guilty of treason; underscored by increasing racial invective and even punctuated in one case by a call from an audience member for someone to be killed.  These aren’t just isolated individuals; these sentiments are common at these rallies and becoming increasingly virulent and enraged — at the rallies and otherwise:

A billboard in West Plains, Mo., showing a caricature of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wearing a turban has caused quite a stir in town.

The sign, located south of West Plains on U.S. 63 across from the Dairy Queen, says: “Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama equals more abortions, same sex marriages, taxes, gun regulations.”

And worst of all, all of this rage and this innuendo is taking place in the most volatile climate of all — one of severe economic distress and anxiety — and these mobs are increasingly becoming convinced, because the Right and the McCain/Palin campaign is leading them to believe it, that this economic crisis is the fault of the black candidate — Obama — for making banks give mortgages to racial minorities.  As an email printed just now by Jonah Goldberg put it — defending someone at a McCain/Palin rally today who screamed he was “very angry” at Obama the “socialist”:

He, and the rest of the conservatives in this country are sick and tired of being taken for granted, having our money stolen by the government and given to lazy, ungrateful people who don’t contribute or produce (or often, aren’t even citizens) anything.

This is what happens when you stoke the fury and resentments of people looking for scapegoats and work them into a blind rage.  And they didn’t just pop up and start believing this.  They’re saying this because the core premise of the McCain/Palin campaign has become that Barack Hussein Obama is a Terrorist-sympathizer, being funded by secret Arab sources, who hates the military and the troops.   As McCain now asks in his most sinister tone in every speech: Who is the real Barack Obama?  As National Review’s illustratively deranged Andy McCarthy put it:  ” Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office.”

Look at those videos linked above if you haven’t seen them (this one, this one and this one).  Is there anything even remotely comparable taking place at Obama rallies?  Are the accusations against McCain even arguably similar to the Right’s relentless and self-evidently dangerous depiction of Obama as a military-hating, subversive Muslim and Terrorist?  What do we do with Terrorists and traitors — or, in the past, with those wanting to take over the U.S. with a secret socialist agenda?  We kill them.  If that’s what Obama is, if that’s what hordes of enraged right-wing mobs are becoming convinced of and having those passions stoked, then what should be done to Obama — just merely defeat him in the presidential campaign?

Balz’s own attempt to justify his even-handedness exposes the absurdity of what he’s doing.  After cataloguing the McCain/Palin attacks on Obama, this is what Balz offers up to show how Fair and Objective he is:

Obama said the McCain plan would reward bad behavior by banks, enrich real estate speculators and cost the taxpayers a bundle. “It’s a plan that would guarantee that you, the American taxpayers, would lose,” he said.

He might have stopped there, since he had made clear his differences with McCain. But he went further, and his words sent a different and far more negative message to the audience. “I don’t think we can afford that kind of erratic and uncertain leadership in these uncertain times,” he said, adding, “We need a president we can trust in times of crisis” …

But in these last weeks of the campaign, Obama and McCain are going farther in their efforts to raise doubts about each other. McCain’s code is to suggest something sinister about Obama, to say there is something lurking in his past that Americans should fear. Obama, by using the word “erratic” to describe his rival seems to suggest that he is in some way unstable and therefore unacceptable.

Saying that McCain has been ”erratic” over the past couple of months is plainly true and, even if it weren’t, it is a claim about McCain’s behavior as a leader, as a candidate, and his ability to lead the country.  By obvious contrast —as Balz himself says — “McCain’s code is to suggest something sinister about Obama, to say there is something lurking in his past that Americans should fear.”  Those accusations exist in different universes.  Beyond that, 100% — 100% — of all McCain ads are now negative attacks on Obama, while only 1/3 of Obama ads entail negative attacks on McCain.

Everyone can see with their own eyes:  over the last two weeks, we have witnessed some of the ugliest and most dangerous attacks by any presidential campaign that one can recall — not from surrogates or from shadowy groups but from the candidates themselves and their campaign.  The most hated, despised thing one can be in the U.S. is a “terrorist,” followed closely by ”traitor” and, in many circles, “Muslim.”  The McCain/Palin ticket’s prime strategy now is to win by scaring Americans into believing that Obama — the first black candidate with a viable chance to become President in our country’s history — is all of those things.  There just is nothing comparable to that.  

Honest journalists will describe that fact.  Cowardly ones for whom “balance” subordinates truth because it insulates them from charges of “bias” will do what Balz just did.

 

UPDATE:  From an Agence France Presse wire story today:

Inflammatory Republican rallies raise concerns

WAUKESHA, Wisconsin (AFP) - Shouts of “terrorist” and “treason” aimed at Barack Obama have echoed around Republican rallies, whipping up into alarming, hate-filled frenzies against the Democratic White House hopeful.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain has taken to asking, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” at rallies this week, leading one supporter in Pennsylvania, a blue-collar battleground state to shout back, “he is a bomb.”

Chants of “Nobama, Nobama” mingled with cries of “terrorist,” as one banner in the crowd declared: “Go ahead, let the dogs out.”

Journalistic attempts to create false equivalencies where none exists — such as Balz’s article today — are, in general, dishonest.  But when it comes to describing what the McCain/Palin campaign is doing in particular, the attempt to create equivalency (“they’re both going negative”) suppresses a vital truth and is also irresponsible in the extreme.  For reasons persuasively set forth here, these tactics are highly unlikely to help McCain win, but they could quite possibly have far-reaching consequences independent of the election outcome.

 

UPDATE II:   McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief John Walcott just received the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and, in accepting the award, gave an absolutely superb speech on the ills of the modern journalist, which is well worth reading in its entirety (h/t reader EC).   But this passage — on the modern journalist’s perverse notion of “balance” — is particularly relevant to the point here:

That brings me to may last point: Relying on The Times, or McClatchy or any other news source, for all the truth is dumb, but it’s infinitely preferable to the pernicious philosophical notions that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is relative, or that, as some journalists seem to believe, it can be found midway between the two opposing poles of any argument… .

Does the truth lie halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or between communism and democracy? If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, must you then give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels? If you write an article that’s critical of John McCain, are you then obligated to devote an identical number of words to criticism of Barack Obama, and vice versa?

Dan Balz — along with most of his colleagues — obviously believes the answer to those questions is “yes,” and as much as anything else, that (as I’ve written about many times before) is what explains why the bulk of modern journalism has become so worthless and corrupted.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on — “and recorded and transcribed” — the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.  The two former NSA employees, who came forward as part of journalist James Bamford’s forthcoming book on the NSA, intercepted calls as part of the so-called “Terrorist  Surveillance Program,” whereby George Bush ordered the NSA in 2001 to eavesdrop on Americans’ calls in secret, without first obtaining judicial approval as required by the law (FISA).  That illegal eavesdropping continued for at least six years — through 2007.

The two NSA whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, were interviewed by ABC News’ Brian Ross.  Kinne said that “US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and ‘collected on’ as they called their offices or homes in the United States.”  He also said his co-workers “were ordered to transcribe these calls.”   Faulk told Ross:  ”when one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said:  ’but sir, there are personal calls,’ the supervisor said: ‘my orders were to transcribe everything’.”   He said that the intercepted calls included highly personal and intimate conversations and even phone sex.

When Ross showed Kinne a video excerpt of George Bush insisting to the nation that only those with links to Al Qaeda were eavesdropped on as part of his illegal spying program, the following exchange occurred:

ROSS:  Kinne says she listened to hundreds of Americans simply calling their families …

KINNE:  Personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything having anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that nobody else should have been listening to.

ROSS:  President Bush has reassured Americans again and again:

GEORGE BUSH:  It’s phone calls of known Al Qaeda suspects making a phone call into the United States.

KINNE:  I would say that that is completely a lie  —  I would call it a lie — because we were definitely listening to Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism…

ROSS:  Kinne says she intercepted, recorded, and transcribed conversations with the military, journalists, and Red Cross and aid workers.

There are, for now, several points worth noting here:

(1) There is one reason and one reason only these abuses occurred:   because George Bush broke the law — committed felonies — by ordering the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.

(2) While the extent of the abuses disclosed here is substantial — “hundreds of Americans”; journalists, Red Cross and aid workers; military officers speaking to their friends and families — these disclosures are from only two relatively low-level individual NSA linguists at one NSA facility in Georgia.  If just these two individuals are aware of this level of abuse, just imagine what the true extent of the abuses is — both quantitatively (how many innocent Americans had their conversations eavesdropped on?) and qualitatively (who, beyond journalists and aid workers, were listened to?).

(3) Most disturbing here is that these calls were not merely surveilled, but were recorded and transcribed.  In whose custody are these recordings and transcripts and what was done with them?

(4) This was not the work of rogue employees or bad apples.  Note that Faulk specifically said that the abuses were brought to the attention of NSA supervisors — the ones whom the Bush administration has repeatedly claimed were adequate substitutes for FISA judges in deciding who should be surveilled — and those supervisors said that they were ordered to transcribe the calls in question.

(5) These abuses aren’t merely grotesque invasions of privacy and civil liberties, though they obviously are that.  Independently, surveillance abuses undermine genuine counter-terrorism efforts and national security interests in the extreme.  If NSA agents are listening in on the calls of innocent Americans, including journalists and aid workers — including their intimate calls and even their “phone sex,” as Faulk said — then that means they’re not listening in on actual terrorist suspects.  

That’s why, as Rep. Rush Holt among many others have long argued, allowing oversight-less eavesdropping not only guarantees civil liberties abuses but also destroys genuine counter-terrorism efforts.  From Ross’ story:

Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.

“By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody,” she said. “You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.”

(6) Let’s not forget who the ultimate culprit is here:  the U.S. Congress, and specifically the Senate Intelligence Committee led for years by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts and now by Democratic Sen.  Jay Rockefeller.  That Committee was created in the wake of the discovery in the mid-1970s that the U.S. Government was abusing its surveillance powers for decades because no judicial oversight was required, and the reason that Committee was created — the reason it exists — is ” to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

But people like Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller (along with Nancy Pelosi and ranking House Intelligence Committee Member Jane Harman) knew that the Bush administration was spying on Americans without warrants — because the administration told them they were — and they did nothing.  Even once The New York Times finally told the country that the Bush administration was breaking the law — only after the Times concealed the story for a full year — the Senate Intelligence Committee never bothered to investigate what the Bush administration was doing with its secret, unlawful spying powers, whether those powers were abused, which Americans were spied upon, and how they were selected.   To this day, they have never bothered to investigate those questions.

Congressional leaders in both parties — including those whose statutory duty was to compel compliance by the intelligence agencies with the law — were absolutely complicit in allowing all of this to happen.  They knew for years that the Bush administration was breaking the law in spying on Americans without warrants and remained quiet and supportive.  Then, this year, Congress — led by Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman (and both major party presidential candidates) — acted to immunize the private telephone companies that broke the law by enabling this spying and to expand the President’s authority to eavesdrop on Americans without meaningful oversight.

(7) None of these revelations of abuse is even remotely surprising, and anyone who feigns surprise — in the administration, in Congress, in the media — is simply lying to conceal their own culpability.  Since the Church Committee, we have known that the U.S. Government, no matter which party is in control, will inevitably abuse eavesdropping powers if those powers can be exercised in secret and without oversight.  The temptation to abuse eavesdropping powers is too great to be resisted.  That was why FISA was enacted — because judicial oversight is the only way to prevent that abuse.   Abuse of this sort is inevitable when a Government is allowed to spy on its own citizens without checks and oversight.

(8) Even without any reports of abuse, what the Bush administration did in spying on Americans without warrants was a felony, punishable with a $10,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison for each offense.  We’ve heard for the last many years — from the David Broders and friends — that it would be terribly divisive, awfully unfair, upsetting and disruptive, for government officials to be held accountable for their violations of the criminal law.  Will these revelations — that innocent Americans were spied upon in large numbers as part of this criminal spying program — change that view?

(9)  Those who have been vigorously protesting expanded executive power and oversight-less surveillance authority for years — and who have been arguing that violations of the criminal law by high government officials cannot be tolerated — have continuously been subjected to accusations that we are shrill, paranoid extremists for believing that government officials should not and cannot be trusted to exercise power in the dark.   Here was what Gen. Michael Hayden — now the CIA Director and the then-Director of the NSA — said in a January, 2006 Press Briefing, in the wake of the NYT disclosure, when asked by an independent journalist about the likelihood of abuse when the NSA eavesdrops without judicial oversight:

I’m disappointed I guess that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst. I’m trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Burnie and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they’re dedicated to it. So I guess the message I’d ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine. This is focused. It’s targeted. It’s very carefully done. You shouldn’t worry.

That was the attitude of the political and media establishment for years — our Government Leaders are Good and want only what is Good for us, and need not have their powers questioned, checked, or limited.   Today’s disclosures are just the revelations of two low-level independent whistle-blowers.  Just contemplate what we will learn — years or decades from now — the Bush administration was really doing as we collectively decided that they could seize and exercise powers, even illegally, and exercise it without limits.

UPDATE:  Just as a reminder of where we are as a surveillance state, Privacy International assesses countries around the world using objective metrics, and ranks each of them for the level of privacy they afford their citizens, using this color-based scheme:

Here’s what they found for 2007:

 

 

The Land of the Free — The Greatest Country Ever to Exist on the Planet for All of Human History — is the least privacy-respecting, most invasive surveillance state of those surveyed (having been downgraded from its 2006 ranking as an “Extensive Surveillance State” to its 2007 designation:  ”Endemic Surveillance Society”), tied only with Russia, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, the U.K., China and Malaysia.

UPDATE II:  ABC News and Brian Ross are touting this story as an “exclusive,” but it’s nothing of the sort.  Back in May, Adrienne Kinne appeared on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, and disclosed these details already, and many more, including the fact that the Bush administration had purpoesly targeted the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad for eavesdropping, where most American journalists were staying (h/t Rumpelstilskin):

KINNE:  And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military—with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists… .

One of the instances was the fact that we were listening to journalists who were staying in the Palestine Hotel. And I remember that, specifically because during the buildup to Shock and Awe, which people in my unit were really disturbingly excited about, we were given a list of potential targets in Baghdad, and the Palestine Hotel was listed as a potential target. And I remember this specifically, because, putting one and one together, that there were journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel and this hotel was listed as a potential target, I went to my officer in charge, and I told him that there are journalists staying at this hotel who think they’re safe, and yet we have this hotel listed as a potential target, and somehow the dots are not being connected here, and shouldn’t we make an effort to make sure that the right people know the situation?

And unfortunately, my officer in charge, similarly to any time I raised concerns about things that we were collecting or intelligence that we were reporting, basically told me that it was not my job to analyze. It was my job to collect and pass on information and that someone somewhere higher up the chain knew what they were doing… .

But the only reason now that I really remember that specific email is because I knew, having listened to journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel, talking with their families and loved ones and talking about whether or not they were safe and trying to reassure their family and co-workers and loved ones that they were safe, when I saw that hotel listed, I thought there was something that was going terribly wrong.

The whole interview with Goodman from four months ago is very worth reading, including Kinne’s discussion of why she took so long to come forward (“I took my clearance incredibly seriously. I had a very high clearance, military intelligence”) and why she came forward now.  And ABC News and Ross should remove their “exclusive” designation from this story.  A real journalist, Goodman, reported most of these facts months ago.

UPDATE III:  This is one of the biggest jokes I’ve ever read, from the now-updated ABC article:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and said the committee has begun its own examination.

“We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration,” Rockefeller said Thursday. “The Committee will take whatever action is necessary.”

Jay Rockefeller has known since at least 2003 that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on Americans without warrants and did nothing as the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then joined with Dick Cheney to crusade for the FISA/telecom amnesty bill passed this year.  After George Bush, Jay Rockefeller is probably the person most responsible in America for these intelligence abuses, and for him to feign surprise and anger — “Wow!  I’m so surprised and upset that warrantless surveillance powers were abused!  I never would have imagined that eavesdropping would be abused if done without oversight!” — is really too much bear.  The only “necessary action” he’s likely to take in response to all of this is to retroactively immunize those responsible.

As sysprog notes in comments, Rockefeller’s statement (“shocked!”) is the exact equivalent of this:

Sen. Claude Raines (D-W.Va.).

For the third debate in a row, actual polling data last night (as well as uncommitted focus groups) revealed that most Americans believe that the Democratic candidate (Obama/Biden) won decisively. In stark contrast, this is what the poll of Fox News viewers found:

In the real world among Americans, Obama won the debate by 15-30 points, but in Fox News World, McCain won the debate by 86-12%. That’s what Fox News is and who their viewers are: a right-wing propaganda outlet with an almost entirely unpersuadable viewership. For that reason, I don’t understand why the Obama campaign helps legitimize them as a real news network by appearing on Fox programs. But the Obama campaign obviously disagrees and regularly does so.

Agree or disagree with that tactical choice, any Democrat preparing to go on Fox News should study how Obama communications director Robert Gibbs mauled Sean Hannity last night and copy and learn from it as though it is Scripture (video below). First, a bit of background: in the 1980s and 1990s, Anthony Martin-Trigona was well-known to New York litigators as a source of warped entertainment, wonderment and universal disgust.

For years, Martin-Trigona ran around continuously suing so many random people on a pro se basis — and when he would lose, he would then sue the lawyers who represented the parties he sued and the judges who ruled against him — that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals actually barred him from commencing any further judicial process without prior authorization, an unprecedented and truly extraordinary order. Some of that history is set forth here. Martin-Trigona would file so many new, rambling lawsuits and motions on a virtually daily basis that, as the Second Circuit pointed out, it actually became impossible for courts even to process: “Martin-Trigona’s voluminous filings have ‘inundated’ the District of Connecticut and his activities have burdened judicial operations to the point of impairing the administration of justice.”

It wasn’t just the quantity but the content that made his litigious behavior so notable. The documents he filed were routinely filled with the most extreme anti-Semitic venom one could find anywhere this side of Mein Kampf. The lawsuits were often based on the theory that a cabal of Jewish judges, lawyers and government officials were conspiring against him, and the Complaints he filed would be filled with artfully-constructed allegations along these lines:

Paragraph 8: On July 12, 1988, the plaintiff-Jew met with aforementioned Jew lawyer to prepare for hearing with the Jew judge.

That’s a paraphrase from memory, but it’s a quite accurate illustration of what his documents routinely contained. In 1986, he ran for Congress in Illinois under this campaign committee: “The Anthony R. Martin-Trigona Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America,” and he wrote sympathetically of the Holocaust. As The Washington Times described this year:

In a New York bankruptcy case, he referred to a judge as a “crooked, slimy Jew.” During the bankruptcy dispute, he filed a civil-rights lawsuit claiming Jewish bankruptcy judges and lawyers were conspiring to steal his property. He asked a court to bar “any Jew from having anything to do with plaintiff’s property.”

In another motion in the case, he wrote: “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property.”

After the mid-1990s, Martin-Trigona re-surfaced in Florida with a name change (“Andy Martin”), ran for public office multiple times as a Republican (even the local GOP repudiated him), then became a vocal supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign, and finally an obsessive “investigator” of Barack Obama, trafficking in the filthiest and most deranged muck that for months stimulated the darkest crevices of the right-wing slime machine. As The New York Times put it, Martin “is credited as being among the first — if not the first — to assert in a chain e-mail message that Mr. Obama was secretly a Muslim.”

Over the weekend, Sean Hannity hosted a show on Fox News entitled Obama & Friends: The History of Radicalism. The star of Hannity’s smear fest was none other than Andy Martin, who was featured as an honored, credible investigator and source to expose “the real Barack Obama.” There wasn’t a hostile or adversarial word uttered by Hannity about or towards Martin. To the contrary, Martin’s claims were the basis for many of the Fox News show’s allegations against Obama. This is how Fox described him on-screen when he spoke: “Andy Martin, AUTHOR & JOURNALIST”:

Hannity turned to Martin after asking what Obama means by “community organizer,” and Martin explained that Obama “was in training for a radical overthrow of the government” — and Fox then promoted Martin’s book:



Martin then linked Obama to Louis Farrakhan, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Catsro, telling Fox’s 2 million viewers: “So if you love the Cuban revolution and Castro and if you love what’s happening in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez, you’ll love Barry Obama — Barack Obama, as he calls himself — in the White House.”

Hannity never once said a negative word about Martin; never challenged him on anything he ever said or did; and never informed Fox viewers about Martin’s despicable, truly demented history. Instead, Martin was Sean Hannity’s respected source, presented as an “Author and Journalist” to support Hannity’s “reporting.” As Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel put it: Fox’s “star witness was Andy Martin, whose incendiary, unsubstantiated claims about Obama’s past were allowed to go unchallenged.”

All of that led to last night’s masterful appearance by Robert Gibbs on Hannity & Colmes after the debate. Gibbs obviously knew that Hannity was interested in asking him only about the most vital issue of the day in the world of right-wing extremism — the exciting attempt to link Obama to Bill Ayers through rank guilt-by-association — and this is the superb exchange that ensued:



If Democrats are going to subject themselves to the low-life tactics of Fox News, that’s the only way to do so — by taking their deceitful standards and, in every instance, applying it to Fox and their “journalists.” Fox News just produced a “documentary” about Obama in reliance on someone like Andy Martin, whose history was concealed from the poor, endlessly propagandized Fox viewers, and yet the myth that Fox is a legitimate news network will continue to be widely maintained.

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One other note: the Anti-Defamation League, needless to say, has not uttered a peep about Fox News and Hannity’s promotion and legitimizing of Andy “crooked, slimy Jew” Martin, because doing so would undermine the ADL’s now patently transparent GOP-supporting agenda. As I’ve documented on several occasions in the past, the ADL routinely ignores instances of blatant Holocaust-trivializing and other acts of game-playing and exploitation of anti-Semitism when coming from Fox News, which generally supports the ADL’s political agenda having nothing to do with its claimed mission.

And that’s to say nothing of the entire cottage industry of pundits and activists that routinely finds and screams about “anti-semitism” at the slightest imaginary provocation when doing so advances their right-wing political agenda or can be used to smear political opponents or suppress debate — from Joe Lieberman, Lanny Davis, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol to the righteous anti-bigotry advocates at Commentary Magazine — none of whom have uttered a peep about Fox News’ promotion of and reliance upon Andy Martin, despite (for most of them) having gone on Fox News since then — despite having, to use their parlance, associated with Fox News since the Hannity/Martin show — without uttering a syllable of condemnation. As usual, those who most flamboyantly and frequently inject screams of “anti-semitism” into our political debates do so only when the accusation serves as a tool for their partisan agenda (see here and here for a particularly disgusting though typical recent example). Nothing has “trivialized” the accusation of “anti-semitism” — or anti-semitism itself — more than that manipulative behavior.

(updated below)

Listening to a Sarah Palin rally is like visiting a museum exhibit of every empty, trite, manipulative right-wing political slogan from the last three decades. Today, an anti-war heckler interrupted her speech in Florida and this is how she responded, to cheers from right-wing throngs both at the rally and around the nation:

Bless your heart sir, my son is in Iraq fighting for your right to protest.

Right, because if Saddam Hussein had remained in power in Iraq — or if we were no longer occupying the country — then the U.S. would have been invaded by the Iraqi Army by now and we’d be living under the tyrannical rule of Ace of Clubs Qusay and Ace of Hearts Uday (and Five of Hearts Dr. Germ and cardless Mrs. Anthrax) and they would have abolished our First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. So that’s exactly what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq: “fighting for our right to protest.” And those who oppose that war, therefore, are unwilling to Fight for Our Freedoms. And Freedom is on the March.

That may be the motive driving many, perhaps most, citizens who join the military. But even under the most romanticized vision, whatever it is that we’re doing in Iraq, fighting for our “right to protest” quite plainly isn’t it.

And then there is the painfully immature sanctimony over Obama’s argument last year that we need more ground troops in Afghanistan “so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” A new McCain/Palin ad all but calls Obama a traitor for that statement (“dishonorable”), and Palin has been sneeringly implying in every speech that this shows that Obama hates both the military and America.

For one thing, Obama’s statement happens to be true. We have killed large numbers of civilians with air raids and that has — rather unsurprisingly — made both the Afghan population and the Afghan government increasingly angry with the U.S. (that tends to happen when you bomb countries and kill innocent people). It’s for that reason that the British Ambassador to Afghanistan said just this week that “the presence — especially the military presence — of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution.” To demand — based on some warped appeal to patriotism — that this reality be ignored is just imbecilic, and is precisely the sort of see-no-evil mentality that led the Bush administration to spend all of 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 telling everyone how great things were going in Iraq and depicting anyone who suggested otherwise as being a Friend of the Terrorist.

And then there’s the fact that John McCain, with regard to the war in Kosovo, made the same argument that Sarah Palin is currently depicting as anti-military and anti-American: namely, that reliance on an air campaign rather than ground forces is resulting in the immoral and unnecessary deaths of civilians:

John McCain in 2000 said because of tactical decisions U.S. troops were put in the position of killing civilians in Kosovo — something awfully similar to the comments he’s now attacking Barack Obama for.

During a Republican primary debate in 2000 McCain called the Clinton strategy in Kosovo “obscene” because it forced troops into using tactics that meant civilians were going to get killed.

“In the most obscene chapter in recent American history is the conduct of the Kosovo conflict when the president of the United States refused to prepare for ground operations, refused to have air power used effectively because he wanted them flying — he had them flying at 15,000 feet where they killed innocent civilians because they were dropping bombs from such — in high altitude.”

McCain was right about that, and Obama is right about what’s happening in Afghanistan. The fact that McCain is producing ads and sending out Palin to accuse Obama of being a treasonous America-hater and military-hater for making comments identical to McCain’s remarks about Kosovo tell you all you need to know about McCain.

Identically, the fact that Sarah Palin’s husband — for years — belonged to, and Palin herself praised and embraced, an explicitly anti-American political party whose leader swore his hatred for the U.S. Government — all the while she attacks Obama on a daily basis for supposedly “anti-American associations” — tells you all you need to know about her and our press corps for allowing her to get away with that:



As Salon’s David Talbot writes in his very well-reported piece today on the relationship between the Palins and this secessionist party:

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

The face that the McCain/Palin campaign is showing now has one significant benefit: it’s a vivid reminder of who has left the country in the state it’s in, the way they’ve done that, and why it is so urgent that, in four weeks, they not just be defeated, but crushed and rendered powerless for a long time.

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For those who use Twitter, my still-infrequently-used Twitter feed is here. It is possible I will be posting commentary here, in a new post, during or immediately after tonight’s debate, so those who are so inclined can check back then (meaning here on the blog, not on Twitter).

UPDATE: Enjoy the bittersweet odor of irrational panic and desperation:

John McCain faces the “crisis of his career,” says former House Speak Newt Gingrich, who predicted the Republican nominee will lose the election unless he makes a public break from the economic bailout proposal.

In a column posted on the Web site of the conservative Human Events Tuesday, Gingrich says it is impossible for McCain to catch up in the national or state polls unless he taps into the anger many Americans feel toward the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street investment banks.

“If Senator McCain is not prepared to separate himself from the Bush-Paulson economic program, he has no opportunity to win,” Gingrich writes… .

Gingrich is the latest prominent conservative to criticize McCain for supporting the bill, which Congress passed last week. Speaking on CNN last week, radio host Glenn Beck said the Arizona senator will lose the election over the vote: I think he lost the election — there was a moment here for somebody here to rise up as a leader,” Beck said.

What Gingrich said might literally be the worst advice ever. Just two weeks ago, McCain created that whole melodrama of how he was suspending his campaign and skipping the debate in order to make the bailout happen. Then he voted in favor of the bailout. Now, a week later, he’s supposed to base his whole campaign on railing against the evils of the bailout? Doing that would more likely result in McCain’s being institutionalized than elected. But that’s what desperation and panic create — that, and the type of venom Sarah Palin is spewing to Munich beer hall crowds.