Flypaper Follies

Hypocrisy most entertaining
Here's the letter I wrote to Lucianne.com after reading her long, weepy attack on liberal Rush gloating.

Lucianne

Do you really not get it, or do you ignore it to write a more forceful column?

The "it," of course, is hypocrisy. That's what we liberals can't help but point out.

Rush spoke harshly of drug addicts. He spoke against treatment and for increased incarceration. He wasn't kind or gentle to them, as you say we should be to him. All while he was addicted.

This, to spell it out, is the problem. It's the hypocrisy of which I speak.

It's not the same as finding Al Franken in a hotel with an underage boy or an overage goat. Franken has never railed against these types of criminals. It's not his bag. He would not be committing the sin of hypocrisy.

Clearer now?

I feel like crying I'm so ashamed
We liberals are wrong -- WRONG! -- to take glee in Limbaugh's misfortune. He's a kind, decent man who's done all kinds of good stuff what liberals will never equal or understand.

That's the message from sincere and concerned right-wing land, where the wily ones are trying to ju-jitsu liberals to the matt over our glee at Limbaugh's hypocrisy.

Mickey Kaus offers some nice links, and gets the hilarity rolling with:

I've never shared the liberal animus toward Rush Limbaugh. The few times I've listened to his show it has been conducted on what seems like a pretty high level.

Oh, but he's just the warm-up act. He links to John Pod-something over at the ever-balanced New York Post. Pod-something's humor is titled "Sick Glee" and it's rife with "Limbaugh is kind and fair and decent and good and liberals are evil" talk. It's full o' mistatements and outright fibs, but this one strikes me as the comedic gem of them all:

Limbaugh engages his callers with unfailing courtesy, and he always affords those callers with whom he disagrees the respect of an honest debate.

This Pod-something guy slays me! He couldn't be any funnier if he tried, certainly. Does he sincerely not know that Limbaugh screens his calls? Stops everyone intelligent who disagrees?

So scary, it's almost imminent

Over at the Washington Post, token right-wing nut Charles Krauthammer joins in the Bush team's Iraq media blitz with a nice little spin on Kay's WMD report. At one point, he makes me feel all scary inside:

Kay's list is chilling. It includes a secret network of labs and safe houses within the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi foreign intelligence service; bioorganisms kept in scientists' homes, including a vial of live botulinum toxin; and my favorite, "new research on BW [biological weapons]-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin" -- all "not declared to the U.N."

There's no reason to rebut this thing point by point (though it's tempting, with all the leaps in logic). You can knock the whole column down with one word: imminent. In taking us to war, Bush argued that Iraq was an imminent threat. Anything less is a lie and a fraud.

Live botulinum toxin in a refrigerator poses no imminent threat. None of this stuff does. Give it up, Krauthammer.

I personally suffer from foresight bias

Jonathan Rauch over at the National Journal has added a new twist to the old "The media's makin' us look bad in Iraq" angle that the right keeps spinning.

He says all us whiners are suffering from "hindsight bias." And the way he says it, it don't sound good atall.

Problem is, his example, about folks saying they would have known better once they hear that something bad has happened, doesn't work at all on those who opposed the war before it started. What's our problem, Jonathan? We're bound to be messin' things up somehow.

If you get a chance, email Jonathan at jrauch@nationaljournal.com and tell him you prefer the flypaper theory, strictly on the basis of entertainment value.

Bill O'Reilly ponders appropriate punishment for Al Franken
(hint: Pop a cap!)

Our friends at Time magazine recently asked Bill O'Reilly 10 questions, and then let him get away with amazingly dishonest answers. As an added bonus, O'Reilly gives us an historical tip on who might have shot Al Franken for what he done.

Here's an example:

WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE TO SHUT UP, HAVE YOU FAILED AS A HOST?
Absolutely not. I only do that very rarely. I maybe a handful of times told somebody directly to shut up. And that's when they were being dishonest or offensive.

It's so easy to bust this one up good. From Slate, a few examples of O'Reilly's courageous stand against dishonest, offensive guests:

"And it is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up once the fighting begins, unless -- unless facts prove the operation wrong, as was the case in Vietnam."
-- Feb. 27, 2003

"What Jimmy Carter should do is privately give Mr. Bush his opinion and shut up publicly."
-- Feb. 18, 2003

"My thesis, you may know, is that nobody should ever talk about their sexuality in any -- in any regard ever. You should not define yourself that way. It just makes life a lot rougher. So, therefore, I would probably say, if you're a gay celebrity, shut up."
-- March 21, 2001

And my favorite lob, swing, and miss, with the ever-restrained O'Reilly talking about how reasonable some would have considered it to "put a bullet between his eyes."

DO YOU REGRET PUSHING THE LAWSUIT AGAINST AL FRANKEN?
Not at all. This man is being run by some very powerful forces in this country, and we needed to confront it. I was ambushed at a book convention. He got up in front of a national audience and called me a liar for 20 minutes. President Andrew Jackson would have put a bullet between his eyes. Franken's job is to do exactly what Donald Segretti did for Nixon -- dig up dirt on people. He is not a satirist; he is not a comedian. He's someone who wants to injure people's reputations, and I think people have got to know that.

Now, the response, from the good folks at brainthink.com:

In February, O'Reilly gave a speech seemingly taking credit for winning a coveted Peabody award while an anchor at the tabloid TV show Inside Edition. After comedian Al Franken pointed out that the show never won a Peabody, O'Reilly retorted, in Mamet-esque syntax (O'Reilly Factor, 3/13/01): "Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, 'O'Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.' Never said it. You can't find a transcript where I said it."

But on his May 19, 2000 broadcast, he repeatedly told a guest who brought up his tabloid past: "We won Peabody Awards. . . . We won Peabody awards. . . . A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you're going to denigrate it?" (Inside Edition won a Polk Award, not the better-known Peabody, for reporting that was done after O'Reilly left the show--Washington Post, 3/1/01.)

The facts don't matter to this guy. The sad fact is, they don't matter to his (enormous) audience, either.

http://www.tothebarricades.com/000668.html#more

Gov. Grope a Go-Go
I was trying to avoid the California recall, but it is part of the Republican takeover strategy as Davis has alleged. He was set up with an amazingly brazen and well-orchestrated energy crisis (which Cheney and Bush blamed on environmentalists, if you recall) and this paved the way for Arnold and company.

Anyways, to diffuse the allegations, Arnold is relying on tactics proven effective by thousands if not millions of guilty yet still beloved spouses: Claim you don't remember (a woefull tale of drunkeness usually comes into play), apologize profusely for anything that might have happened when you weren't remembering, and promise to be the best damn (insert gender here) from now on. For good measure, bash whatever messenger might be handy.

This morning NPR played tape from one of Arnolds' rallies. An aid warmed up the crowd by asking rhetorically "Do we read the L.A. Times?" The crowd's answer, of course, was "No!"

I can't find Arnold's quote from the rally, but it indeed was the classic "I don't remember, but if I did anything wrong I'm sorry."

Here's the quote from yesterday, pulled from the L.A. Times web site:

"So I want to say to you, yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful. But I now recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that, and I apologize."

He's just a crazy kid hanging with rowdy friends. Things happen. He's sorry. It didn't mean anything.

Asked later about the specific incidents in an interview on CNN, Schwarzenegger said: "I don't remember so many of the things that I was accused of having done."

Or perhaps you did them for publicity's sake, Arnold? Like the gang sex talk?

Arnold's from Hollywood. It's a whole different game
I'm gathering responses from Republicans, the straight talkin' folk who pursued Clinton to the point of impeachment over similar matters.

I liked this from Kausfiles in reference to the trail blazed by Clinton:

Schwarzenegger stands on the shoulders of the gropers who came before him.

More from the L.A. Times:

"What we saw in the L.A. Times today was not an attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger," said Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas). "It was an attack on every single one of us who want to take back California."

The actor's major Republican recall opponent, state Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks, said he viewed the accusations "with a high degree of skepticism," because they emerged so close to the election.

But "if true, these acts are reprehensible and inexcusable," he said. "And as the father of a 13-year-old daughter, I'd say to him, 'Get out of the race.' "

Wilson's a lefty and what the heck is this all about anywho?
This pretty much sums up the Republican response to The Revenge of Yellowcake. Although the "Wilson's a lefty" camp seems to be dwindling, high-minded beffudlement has a strong following. Glen Reynolds is all over it with:

I don’t pretend to understand the Wilson affair, in which someone — perhaps at the White House, perhaps not — is accused of “outing” the wife of administration critic Joseph Wilson as (perhaps) an undercover CIA operative.

and

If, as some claim, government officials deliberately broke a secret agent’s cover out of spite, then those responsible should be sacked, and perhaps even prosecuted as it may, depending on circumstances, even be a felony. At the moment, however, we really don’t know what happened.

The Wall Street Journal briefly joins in the befuddlement, before discovering-- surprise!--politics at the core of it. This, an excerpt from a WSJ editorial I pulled from Howard Kurtz' column today:

"We've been knocking our heads trying to figure out how a minor and well-known story about an alleged CIA 'outing' has suddenly blossomed into a Beltway scandal-ette. The light bulb went off reading Monday's White House press briefing.

"Right out of the box, Helen Thomas asked if 'the president tried to find out who outed the CIA agent? And has he fired anyone in the White House yet?' OK, the point of this exercise is to get President Bush to fire someone. But whom? That answer became clear when the press corps quickly uttered, and kept uttering for nearly an hour, the name 'Karl Rove.'

"Of course! The reason this is suddenly a story is because Mr. Rove, the President's political strategist and confidant from Texas, has become the main target."

Because, you know, the press is always out to get this Bush administration. Damn liberal media, always giving those rotten Clintons a free ride and coming down hard on a decent man like Bush.

It should be easy to find the leakers
I'm probably missing something here, some point of law, but I can't understand why it can be so hard to find the administration officials who exposed the CIA agent. Yet, everywhere I turn, I see naysayers like this

Law enforcement sources say regardless of who's in charge, the chances of this investigation going anywhere are next to none, reports CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts. A year after it happened, the FBI is still investigating a leak of classified information about Osama Bin Laden from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"It's always difficult to prosecute leak cases because the person who leaked it almost never admits that he did it, and absent a confession it's almost impossible to find out who did it," Jeffrey Smith, former Justice Department general counsel, tells CBS.

They have the White House phone records. They know the date of at least one call, the one made to Novak. They can identify other calls made to news organizations in that time period. They have White house email. They know who is privy to the agent's identity. Seems like there's a real possibility they could nail somebody.

Ideas? Opinions? Email me at aidandcomfort@hotmail.com

It's just like World War II, only Bush is more like Ike than FDR
Oy, the dizziness brought on by the spinning and more spinning.

As I mentioned earlier, Glenn Reynolds is leading the charge against war coverage, urging the media to look more deeply into new plumbing facilities while letting the ambushes slide. One of his pals at the New York Post took up the banner and immediately started spinning furiously, if you can picture someone spinning around while grasping a big banner. Here's my favorite part of it:

When NBC anchor Tom Brokaw went to Iraq, it was as if he was visiting a different country than that any other TV journalist had reported from, because he left Baghdad and many of his reports actually had an optimistic tone.

Why? Perhaps because Brokaw has chronicled the Greatest Generation and World War II, a time of patience instead of attention deficit disorder and a demand for overnight success. Nowadays, one can imagine critics instantly howling for Dwight D. Eisenhower's head over the deaths on D-Day.

Can one really imagine that? Ike taking heat for invading Hitler's fortress Europe? I can't. I don't think the writer, Deborah Orin, can either.

The idea here is to repeat an old Bush spin point, namely "Saddam equals Hitler." It was ridiculous back then, when the WMD question was up in the air, and it's ludicrous now. If we were to put this in a folder, we could title the folder "aching to justify."