Today's "Bridge On The River Kwai" Metaphor

A metaphor, via brief film clip, of the day after Election 2016, wherein Sir Alec Guinness plays the Trump- normalizing, horserace hankering, Clinton- hating media, and the bridge is America.



Of course, that would wrongly presume they had self- awareness and consciences.

BONUS: These tweets illustrate the point:

Trump banned the press from his Mexico trip. The MSM takeaway here will be "Why won't Hillary Clinton do press conferences?"

— Martha Jackovics (@BeachPeanuts) August 31, 2016

Trump's team (literally): Mexico trip is about optics, intended to dupe media.

Cable news: Wow! I can hardly believe my eyes. What a show!

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) August 31, 2016

Tweets Of The Day - The Long And Winding Narratives

Please enjoy two & a half decades of people asking HRC the same "question." "People hate you: please respond." https://t.co/AqlkUzPmfV

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) August 4, 2016

So interesting to see cable nets and print reporters using emails to try to create equivalence/"balance" between Trump and Clinton

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) August 5, 2016

We're in an Armageddon election with a neo- fascist, existential threat to our country and the world representing the Republican Party.  This is how the feckless, insipid media respond.

See also post below.

Worst Year In Washington? Narrative Pundits Like Chris Cillizza

Hunter, at Daily Kos, turns the tables on the "narrative pundits" who come up with lists like "Worst Year in Washington," like, um, say Republican- wired Chris "Lizard" Cillizza.  Cillizza, who thinks covering politics like a horse race is the best use of his time, just dropped his "Worst Year" deuce on us:  it's J.E.B.! and (wait for it) Hillary Clinton (!).  Because... both sides?  In this excerpt, Hunter gives us the short version of Cillizza's opus, then gives us his take on who had the Worst Year in Washington: 

... Short version: She was too snippy in defending herself and in pointing out that her email policy was both accepted practice at the time and legal and that her predecessors had done the same thing for the same reasons. She came off as "angry and legalistic" in her observations that not a damn speck of it was wrong. And this enforced The Narrative, which is the longstanding, decades-old notion that Hillary Clinton is malevolent and hiding something, promoted exclusively by Republicans Who Say So and pundits who Write That Down, and so Hillary Clinton has had the Worst Year in Washington because Republicans keep attacking her and she faces, in the primary, a single formidable opponent.  [snip]

Who had the Worst Year in Washington? I would say any of us who were looking to the press to tell us who was honest, rather than just mulling over which lies were told with the most conviction. Any of us who were looking for a knowledgable free press to winnow through the scandals and tell us which were real and which were invented, or anyone reading a paper who wanted to know if this or that pronouncement from one of our national leaders was accurate, rather than immediately wandering off to a sentence about how some other fellow on the opposing sporting team didn't think highly of it.  (our emphasis)

Amen to all that.

Let this be Exhibit (infinity) of how our puerile corporate media has gone along with and, by their cowardice and abdication of journalistic ethics and responsibility, abetted the tectonic shift of the Republican Party farther and farther to the right and into the swamps of neo- fascism over the past 40- plus years.

Oh, and Chris Cillizza is a douchnozzle.

Washington Post Reporters Observe Clinton "Gaffes" As Provided By Republican Spinmeisters

The once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's Clinton hit squad is back on her trail, parsing her comments at the recent Democratic debates and declaring some to be "gaffes."  What did they detect?

First, she and other Democrats on the stage refused to say the words “radical Islam,” another moment immediately seized upon by Republicans.

Horrors!  She failed to use the well- advised Republican incantation words that have worked so well for us since 9/11 and the bungle into Iraq (which the neo- con Bezos Bugle cheered on, of course)!  What other campaign- ending "gaffe" did their news hounding uncover?

Finally, as the debate came to a close, Clinton delivered the made-for-TV sound bite about the ’60s, pegging herself as the opposite of the fresh face that many voters are looking for.

Oh, so she revealed she was alive in the 60's!  We wouldn't have known that otherwise.  Thanks for the tip!  Then, they ask Republican and Koch brothers re-branding stooge Frank "Dunce" Luntz (born 1962) his valuable opinion:

By Sunday morning, conservative Web sites had assembled multiple competing videos of the 1960s remark, their only disagreement coming over whether to add a clip from “Back to the Future” or a lava lamp. “I can guarantee that this will appear in some ad at some point,” said pollster Frank Luntz. “Nobody, Republican or Democrat, wants to vote for a candidate from the 1960s when we’re well into the 21st century."

We wonder if Luntz delivered his talking points to the reporters verbally or in crayon.

Well, if all a voter is looking for is a "fresh face," the Republicans have lots of those:  Dr. "Mental Ben" Carson, business visionary "Snarly" Carly Fiorina, Sen. Marco "Glug Glug" Rubio (R-AWOL).  Indeed, those are "fresh faces" with not much behind the faces.  Hey, why vote for a candidate from the 1960's when you can vote for a candidate from the 1860's like any of the Republicans in the clown car bus?

ISIS?  Boots on the ground!

Economic progress?  See post below.

Livable wage?  Job killer!

Climate change?  Doesn't exist.

Women's rights?  It's a man's world!

Evolution?  Satan's work.

Immigration reform?  Deport 15 million people and build a wall.

LGBT rights?  Pray away the gay!

Yes, this is clearly a party looking bravely at the 21st century...  and running away from it as fast as possible.  Thanks for pointing that out, Bezos Bugle Clinton hit squad!  (Oh, wait, you didn't.)

"Liberal media" my ass.

Sorry, Media - Hillary Clinton Isn't Losing Ground

Despite the on-going media drumbeat suggesting Hillary Clinton's support is sagging, let's see what the composite trend lines are for her against the Republican field (click on image to enlarge):

Courtesy Daily Kos Elections

As David Nir notes:

The chart above shows a combined average of every single national poll taken since March 1 of this year that pits Clinton against the 10 leading Republican candidates—197 matchups in all, courtesy of Huffington Post Pollster. The key takeaway, as you can see from the blue and red trendlines, is that the race has been remarkably static.

In fact, at the beginning of March, Clinton led the GOP field by an average of 50.3 to 42.6, or 7.7 percentage points. Now, in late August, she leads 48.7 to 41.2, or 7.5 percent. Clinton's "collapse," in other words, is 0.2 percent! No serious analyst would consider that anything more than a rounding error. (And we're not cherry-picking the start date, either: The picture is the same if you dial it back to Jan. 1.)

And about those Clinton "unfavorable" numbers the media likes to quote?

Now of course any politician wants her favorability numbers to be in positive territory. But it doesn't matter nearly as much as you might think, because if you're running for president in this 50-50 nation of ours, there's a very good chance your opponent is also under water. Clinton's favorables, according to HuffPo's average, stand at 42-50 today—not great, but Jeb Bush's are quite a bit worse, at 33-47. Yet we haven't seen panicked media reports about Jeb's lousy numbers. That ought to tell you something.

What it tells us is something we've known for a long time:  the media (in particular the Beltway pundits, New York Times and once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle) has an obsession with taking Hillary Clinton down, and in that regard it's willing to be the stenographer for any right-wing Republican operation that feeds them bogus "stories."  It's been frustrating and aggravating to watch them flog this narrative, but knowing that it hasn't had any significant effect so far is encouraging.

The Panic In Noodle Park*

As desperate Republicans and their handmaidens in the media flog the Clinton email non-scandal, and resultant "panic" among "some Democrats," Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gives us a little perspective:

The hypocrisy in this case is also pretty rich, because the use of outside email accounts is a pretty standard and open secret in government at almost all levels, from local to national.  The former and current Republican governors now attacking Clinton — Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal — have all dealt with similar controversies, as did Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

And during the George W. Bush administration, some 88 senior officials in the Bush White House were discovered to have used non-governmental email accounts to conduct government business and evade transparency requirements; email from more than 50 of those officials — amounting to somewhere between 5 million and 20 million emails — somehow disappeared and most were never recovered. Nobody was prosecuted for it.

One more point: There’s no evidence that Clinton’s email system was ever compromised, and as we’ve seen from recent hacks, keeping her emails on a “protected” government server would not exactly have been a guarantee of secrecy from prying foreign eyes. That doesn’t excuse her decision, but it’s nonetheless true.  (our emphasis)

Whether it's Whitewater, or Benghazi!!!, or the Clinton Foundation, or this, Clinton-haters have always been engaged in throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.  Sometimes, as Bookman notes, unforced errors by the Clinton operation compound the situation.  But mostly it's a lot of noise generated by Republicans with the avid assistance of puerile Clinton-hating "journalists" who love a good horse race, to hell with the implications for our country.

The Beltway Boyz love to write about "Democrats in panic mode" (never offering any names, because sources!).  We fully believe that there are spineless, hand-wringing Democrats (=cough= Schumer =cough=), and Democrats who are shilling for one candidate or another.  But for every "Democrat in panic mode," we bet there are 50 Democrats who still wouldn't trade places with wrong- side- of- history Republicans and their catastrophic clown show.

* Apologies to Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and James Mills.

BONUS:  Nate Cohn would also like to inject some reality into the equation.

The Clintons And "Right-Wing Media Rube Fleecing"

TPM's Josh Marshall has a good read today on what he calls the "Vince Fosterization" of all things related to the Clintons.  Here's an appetizer:

... As with most things Clinton, there's enough to get everyone interested and virtually never enough for there to be any real there there. If there were less of the former or more of the latter, the story would have a clearer, more satisfying conclusion. With the Clintons, the inevitable gap between their pursuers' hopes and the mundane reality, the expectations and inevitable disappointment is the beautiful face that sets sail to a thousand ships of nonsense, wishful thinking and right-wing media rube fleecing.

Part of what is endless and exhausting about the Clintons is that they really do always push it right to the line. We've seen it enough times to know they're generally smart enough and careful enough not to go over it. Indeed, one of the paradoxical benefits of the endless and frenetic investigations of the Clintons in the '90s is that these probes stand as an unintentional proof that there's no real goods there to find. One of the countless committee investigations and special counsel inquiries would have found it. But, as I said, they push it right up to the line.

Yet it's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior. It's got to be more. It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment. Why else do we have 'Benghazi', the President's birth certificate, the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of the White House and so much more? And if you think that's bad, you should have seen the '90s.  (our emphasis)

We saw the 90's, lived through it, suffered through it. It was every bit as exhausting as Marshall says, with constant efforts by Republicans (who saw the Reagan years fast disappearing in their rear view mirror) to bludgeon Bill Clinton, capped by an impeachment trial which was not about anything related to governance, but for lying about a b.j.   All the while, the corporate "mainstream media" was happily letting itself be led around by its nose ring by those media-fleecing Republicans. The whole spectacle of undercutting a twice-elected President over fever-brain conspiracies and a dubious impeachment should have kept Republicans out of government at the national level for a generation or more (and would have if the Supreme Court didn't award the Presidency to Dumbya). It also disabused many of us of the notion that the corporate media were  honest brokers when it came to the Clintons or politics in general.

What Marshall refers to the "right-wing media rube fleecing" continues unabated today (witness the digital media anti-Hillary ratf**king and deals cut by the New York Effing Times and the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle to piggyback on the scurrilous "Clinton Cash" book by right-wing hack Peter Schweizer).  The once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's stable of Republican-enabling hacks is working day and night in the hope of uncovering a Clinton money scandal under the "mundane reality" of a successful charitable foundation and publicly available records of speaking fees.  At the very least, these hacks just want to throw up enough mud for others to say "It's out there."

Meanwhile, the hundreds of Adelsons and Kochs in plutocrat land plowing untraceable millions into right-wing coffers, and Jebbie's solicitation of "no more than $1 million, please" from Republican fat cats, is so yesterday's news to these bloodhounds.  Nothing to see here, move along!  But on the other hand, as Marshall notes, critics of the Clintons (and they staff and run both the Times and the Bezos Bugle) are never going to be satisfied in their quest for scandal, because there must be more there!  It feeds their obsession to have Hillary Clinton respond to their questions, as if they were honest brokers for the public's right to know. *

We hope she continues to take questions -- from average Americans, not the corporate "mainstream media."

*BONUS:  Charles Pierce extends and amplifies the point (with ups for slapping the Bezos Bugle's horse race tout rube Chris Cillizza upside the head).

BONUS II:  This is how Hillary recently responded to a "Will you answer my important loaded Fox 'News" question?"  More please.

Ready For Hillary ... Smearing

Now that Hillary Clinton has officially announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination "coronation" for President, the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party has a new target for its lies, smears and hair- on- fire rhetoric:

[T]heir national party has already put itself on a footing for a general-election battle with Clinton — ignoring her lesser-known Democratic rivals and reviving Clinton scandals and pseudoscandals old and new.

Reince Priebus, the combative chairman of the Republican National Committee, is leading the blitz. In recent days, the RNC has launched its “Stop Hillary” initiative with a Web ad that raises questions about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and her use of a private e-mail account at the State Department.

Clinton critics in the conservative movement have also been active. Books, films and social-media campaigns are all in the works, set to be unleashed in the coming months.

"Unleash the hounds, Reince Priebus!" (the "emptiest suit in America" -- h/t Charles Pierce).  Yes, we're quite sure that we will get more Benghazi! Benghazi!! BENGHAZI!!!  and email-gate conspiracies re-warmed-over and served to us, as well as "shocking" "new" "revelations (!)" =cough= old chestnuts =cough= about the Clinton Foundation, or Huma Abedin, or who killed Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a rolling pin.  All scurrilous memes to be aided and abetted by the Clinton-hating media.  Some "coronation."

We can also be quite sure that Republicans might be (barely) smart enough to temper their sexist tirades and soft-pedal their War on Women policies, so as not to stimulate the female and progressive vote for Hillary (Republican blind squirrel Kathleen Parker counsels that today).  But, even if they use female surrogates like business- and politics-failure Carly "Snarly" Fiorina to catapult their smears, women voters know which party will fight for them and is on the side of equal pay for equal work, women's reproductive rights, and all the other issues vital to them, and it ain't the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party.

BONUS:  Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog gives us some examples of the comedy stylings of self-certified ophthalmologist Sen. "Ayn" Rand Paul (Dudebro-Catskills), whose family has no baggage, no sir!

They're Not Laying A Glove On Hillary Clinton

With the usual caveats (... mumble mumble election far away... mumble mumble... hasn't announced yet), the Republican/ media efforts to bring Hillary Clinton down a peg or two are still in the "FAIL" category:

... In the [CNN/ORC] poll's head-to-head match-ups, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul comes the closest to Clinton, but her 11-point lead over him, 54 percent to 43 percent, isn't what you'd call razor thin. 

After Paul, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio trails Clinton by a mere 13 points, 55 to 42, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is one more point back, drawing 41 percent to Clinton's steady 55 percent, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all poll 15 points behind Clinton, 55 to 40. Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson also polls at 40 percent, but Clinton gains an extra point on him, rising to 56 percent.

That's right:  the closest margin is 11 points!  As far as her "favorables/ unfavorables" compared to Republican candidates, it's pretty much the same ass-kicking story.  And this poll was taken last week, in the midst of the mediagasm over Clinton's State Department emails.

So expect the right-wing noise machine and "mainstream media" to re-double their efforts on "email-ghazi!!" and other phantasms that inhabit their lizard brains.

Hillary Clinton Needs To Work On Her Crap Deflector

E.J. Dionne, Jr., has some worthy observations and good advice in the wake of the "scandal"-driven media's obsession with picking every scab with the name "Clinton" on it:

But those who say the episode is about Clinton’s alleged sense of entitlement have it wrong. This actually speaks to her hard-earned paranoia about what her opponents — and the media, which in her view so often play ball with them — are willing to do to destroy her. Her mistrust may be understandable in light of the past, but it is profoundly counterproductive. 

It would be naive to suggest that being more open with the media always works in favor of the transparent politician. Clinton can highlight the fact that her much-praised answer-every-question news conference on Whitewater in 1994 failed to shut down the story. She also turned out to be right that no good would come the Clintons’ way from naming a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. [snip] 

... To survive the next 20 months until Election Day, she will have to find her way toward a less viscerally antagonistic view of media scrutiny that distinguishes between partisan muggings and the sorts of questions all presidential candidates inevitably confront. 

It may be true that recent days showed she has enemies and harsh critics not only among Republicans but also in mainstream media circles. But focusing solely on them will only encourage her to delay responding to legitimate inquiries and to write off advisers who counsel her toward a less-hostile approach to scrutiny. 

Just reading the once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's coverage and analysis of the "scandal" gives you a pretty good sense of how the narrative the Republicans ("Benghazi!!!") and their willing cohorts in the media (note the accompanying photo with the Lizard Cillizza article) will be reinforced whenever possible in the next 20 months.  And that's just one outlet of many.  It's not going to be pretty, and that's why Dionne is right on the mark that Clinton needs to adopt a different approach to deflecting the inevitable crap that's headed her way.

While the Republicans continue to play the media like a cheap violin, you also have the usual spineless Democrats wringing their hands and speaking on- and- off- the- record with the Jimmy Olsens of the Beltway Village.  While it's a given that many in the Democratic Party and it's hangers-on in the consulting world are preternaturally skittish or are simply feeling left out, they need to remember the environment in which all of this is happening.  Republicans, having nothing but a fully-loaded clown car of prospective nominees, are doing what they do best:  trying to cut down the presumptive Democratic nominee as much as possible (and, yes, she will be the nominee if she wants it). Democrats need to get into their 2016 campaign mode fast because the Republicans (and their media megaphones) are already well into it.

BONUS:  Paul Waldman says it all right here:

While the Clintons bear responsibility for getting many of those scandals going with questionable decision-making or behavior, it's also true that the mainstream media made huge mistakes during that period by treating every Republican charge, no matter how ludicrous, as though it was worthy of a full-scale investigation splashed across the front page. Again and again, they reacted to the most thinly justified accusations as though the next Watergate or Iran-Contra was at hand, and when it turned out that there was no corruption or illegality to be found, they simply moved on to the next faux-scandal, presented no less breathlessly. 

That past — and journalists' failures to reckon with it — are still affecting coverage today. When this email story broke, how many journalists said it was important because it "plays into a narrative" of Hillary Clinton as scandal-tainted? I must have heard it a dozen times just in the past week. 

Here's a tip for my fellow scribes and opinionators: If you find yourself justifying blanket coverage of an issue because it "plays into a narrative," stop right there. That's a way of saying that you can't come up with an actual, substantive reason this is important or newsworthy, just that it bears some superficial but probably meaningless similarity to something that happened at some point in the past. It's the updated version of "out there" — during the Clinton years, reporters would say they had no choice but to devote attention to some scurrilous charge, whether there was evidence for it or not, because someone had made the charge and therefore it was "out there." (our emphasis)

Today's Cartoon Twofer - Get Out The Knives

(click on images to enlarge)

(Jim Morin, The Miami Herald)

(Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

When those honest, ready to govern Republicans come for a knife fight, Democrats need to bring their "guns."

Hillary Clinton's E-Mails: More Grist For The Scandal-Driven Media

When you start seeing the puerile "mainstream media" tossing around terms like "bombshell" and "scandal," you can generally bet it's an Obama- or Clinton-bashing tale.

The latest kerfuffle is over the fact that Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail account when she was Secretary of State.  Unforced error?  Obviously.  Legal?  Probably so.  "Scandal worthy?" Benghazi!!! Let's start with Jon Stewart's take on the matter:

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O.K.  Fair enough.  In fact, we would heartily endorse Digby's "disclaimer" about the media's latest "pseudo-scandal" (with our emphasis):

I am going to issue the standard disclaimer that if Clinton did something real bring it on.  But this is a patented pseudo-scandal planted by the Benghazi bullshit squad and I'm not jumping on the bandwagon. 

If somebody wants to do an expose of Clinton's cozy relationship with Wall Street, her hawkish foreign policy or her penchant for nonsensical bipartisan cant, that's perfectly fair.  In fact, it's necessary. I think a hardcore investigation into the Clinton Foundation and all its opaque financial dealings is absolutely in bounds. But when they start recycling rightwing Benghazi crapola, referencing Whitewater,talking about her "calculating Machiavellian character"  and don't even have a clue about what it is she's supposed to have done wrong, just that it doesn't "pass the smell test", I'm going to be ornery. This is the Village in all its glory and I'm sad to say that a new generation of Villagers is just as willing to chase the shiny object for the Dark Ops wingnuts as their forebears. 

This is the scandal-driven media at its absolute worst... again... fed by a Republican smear machine that is pulling out all the stops to rough up Clinton.

Hey, you want a real scandal?  How about how the media has ignored or played down the greatest political story of the last 50 years:  the radicalization of the Republican Party.  They can still take a cue from Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, who identified the problem in April 2012 (spoiler alert: "the Republicans are the problem") and offered this advice to the media:

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

(Ed. note: Of course, if the Beltway Village actually followed that advice, it would depopulate the Sunday talking heads shows of both politicians and pundits.)  We're sure the media will hop on that just as it did 3 years (and a lot of insanity) ago, after they finish flogging "e-mailgate."

BONUS:  Ed Kilgore helpfully reminds us that there are also reasons some Democratic Party hacks have to keep this "scandal" going.  Good read.

Republican Outreach to Women: Hillary Clinton Special

Wow.  Scared and stupid much?  Buttons displayed at the California Republican convention:

After she kicks your asses from coast to coast in 2016 (run, Hillary, run), perhaps a new button will be in order: "KFC Republican Special:  All The Crow You Can Eat."

With Enemies Like These....

As speculation grows about whether (or when) Hillary Clinton will formally announce her candidacy for President (the election's more than 3 years away, for goodness sake), the usual Clinton-haters are unsheathing their knives and sharpening them for the smear assault.  We know that the right-wing will be ginning up new and old conspiracy theories (Benghazi!, BENGHAZI !!) to try to smear Clinton, but we also have to take note, as the very-readable Michael Tomasky observes, of the Boomer "liberals" exemplified by Maureen "MoDo" Dowd and Richard "The Adulterer" Cohen.  Their often snotty, self-righteous pieces on both Clintons reflect a certain segment of the Boomer generation's purist view of how nobly members of that generation (including Hackwhackers) should behave.

Tomasky's piece is well worth a read, if only to understand how some Boomer journalists continue to downplay the, if you will, elephant in the room:  the lunacy of the Rethuglican / Stupid Party and what it's doing to the country.