SmithAntics

Joe Biden's best service to the Democratic Party's base would be to sit down and shut up.

This guy Biden is another poster child for why we Democrats are now in permanent minority status. He's a useless corporate-military proponent, whose presence on these shows results in the dangerous illusion of "presenting both sides."

Hey, Joe Biden: you're a corporate lackey, and an Iraq War enabler. Take a long hike, before someone gets the very bad idea of you as a presidential candidate.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

The much-touted American-style "town hall" meeting the White House has been planning with "normal Germans" of everyday walks of life will be missing during his visit to the Rhine River hamlet of Mainz this afternoon.

A few weeks ago, the Bush administration had declared that the chat -- which could have brought together tradesmen, butchers, bank employees, students and all other types to discuss trans-Atlantic relations -- would be the cornerstone of President George W. Bush's brief trip to Germany [...]

The Germans, though, insisted that a free forum should be exactly that. Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany's Ambassador to the United States, explained to the New York Times last week: "We told them, don't get upset with us if they ask angry questions."

A devout Shiite, who according to an aide has the scholarly rank of mujtahid, or one qualified to give religious rulings, Jafari refuses to shake the hands of women and was behind a move last year to make Islamic law Iraq's legal basis for dealing with issues such as marriage, divorce and inheritances.

A potential male prostitute gets White House credentials using a fake name, provides McClellan a welcome ideological lifeline during press conferences, and somehow gets access to classified CIA documents that outs an undercover CIA operative.

The United States government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense. For members of the mainstream media, trying to maintain a sense of self-importance and solemnity and to keep the wing nuts from crowing for more scalps, this requires a series of stratagems to keep up the scripted charade, no matter how foolish it makes them look or feel while doing so.

The easiest of these stratagems is simply to stack the coverage with political partisans and give them free rein to spout GOP propaganda. That's what the cable news networks do, as Media Matters for America demonstrated. Consistent with cable inauguration coverage, for example, MSNBC offered viewers of its State of the Union commentary eleven right-wing pundits and just two Democrats or liberals in response.

The second technique is more often deployed on network television, where such naked partisanship is frowned upon, but executives are, if anything, even more worried about appearing unsympathetic to the red-state, red-meat offerings of George W. Bush. This is to ignore the substance and focus on the spectacle, the "feelings" and the atmosphere. CBS's Bob Schieffer, on his best post-Dan Rather behavior, for instance, marveled, "One of the best-delivered speeches that I have heard President Bush make. He was confident, he was direct, he drove his points home."

On ABC, Cokie Roberts found herself enthralled with a faux-dramatic--and most likely fully staged--embrace between an Iraqi woman seated next to Laura Bush and the mother of a soldier who died for Bush's folly in Falluja, gushing, "To have that completely spontaneous hug was something that leaves you with goose bumps." Tim Russert--who, like so many Democratic pols who transition to media megabucks, is committed to proving his bona fides by kowtowing to Republicans at every opportunity--professed, "You can feel...in this town" that Democratic "nerves are frayed." Russert was reacting to a rare display of Democratic spirit during the speech--booing when Bush sought to mislead the country into dismantling the most successful government program ever attempted in America: Social Security. To Russert and much of the permanent Washington establishment, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat--or at least one who's willing to act that way.

Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an outfit owned by Arkansas Democrats and had been trained in journalism by James Carville. Imagine that this gentleman had been cultivated and called upon by Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart—or by President Clinton himself. Imagine that this "journalist" had smeared a Republican Presidential candidate and had previously claimed access to classified documents in a national-security scandal.

Slowly, for the mouth breathers….

Obviously, the point is not that Gannon/Guckert is gay.

The point is that a fake journalist working for a fake news website, who was apparently leading a double life--allegedly even running an illegal business--somehow gained access to one of the most secure facilities on the face of the planet, under a fake name, in order to ask fake questions the White House wanted asked during press conferences.

You don't get into the White House by showing up and flashing a press pass that you Photoshopped together and had the local copy shop laminate. And you certainly don't get into the White House briefing room by virtue of working for a freshly minted partisan website, unless you are very well connected. The point is, the White House and/or its surrogates really shouldn't be in the business of inventing fake news agencies in order to manipulate public opinion. But they were, and they got caught. (...and it should go without saying that this goes waaaay beyond the "tradition" we've heard so much about lately of making sure you've got a friendly journalist in the audience. Fox News wasn't friendly enough, for chrissakes?)

Gannon/Guckert's alleged porn sites and "escort" activities are relevant in that they highlight the utter incompetence of the administration--somebody somehow thought it would be a bright idea to use this guy, and nobody bothered to vet him to see if they were going to end up with egg on their faces. Any right winger who pretends that G/G worked for a legit news agency and is simply the innocent victim of a gay witch hunt is either too stupid to tie his own shoes in the morning, or is being deliberately dishonest. No third choice.

Remember, the GOP will unload on Dean. Everytime you hear the "Dean Scream" without context, consider donating. When you hear some empty head talk about the party "moving left" with Dean, consider donating. When you hear about unnamed big dollar Democratic donors whining about pulling their money out of the party, consider donating.

A potential male prostitute gets White House credentials using a fake name, provides McClellan a welcome ideological lifeline during press conferences, and somehow gets access to classified CIA documents that outs an undercover CIA operative.

Partisan operative with no background in journalism, whose work frequently involves passing off RNC press releases as his own stories, is allowed to be a part of White House press briefings day after day, operating under a pseudonym, providing a regular lifeline for Scott McClellan and making it difficult for other reporters to get answers to serious questions.
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Having worked in the White House, I can assure everyone that not only would it be impossible to get a White House pass using an alias, it is impossible even to get past the gate for an appointment using an alias. Thorough FBI background checks are required for the former and a picture ID is necessary for the latter. Therefore, if Gannon was using an alias, White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.

Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.

Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.

Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.

Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.

Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.

Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.