DEMOCRATS STILL DON'T HAVE A WORKING NOISE MACHINE, SO WE'RE USING THE GOP'S

James Oliphant of National Journal is running around with his hair on fire because the non-conservative blogosphere is not conservative:

Progressive Bloggers Are Doing the White House's Job

This administration enjoys an advantage afforded no other: a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute.

Really, it's hard to get past the subhead of this piece. "No other" administration in American history was ever able to take advantage of "a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute"? Did I hallucinate that Fox News and AM talk radio existed on January 20, 2001, and continued to exist continuously through January 20, 2009? According to Oliphant, I did:

While the bond between presidential administrations and friendly opinion-shapers goes back as far as the nation itself, no White House has ever enjoyed the luxury that this one has, in which its arguments and talking points can be advanced on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis. No longer must it await the evening news or the morning op-ed page to witness the fruits of its messaging efforts.

(Since there were apparently no news-cycle-busting media outlets prior to the Obama presidency, I guess we all hallucinated the entire Monica Lewinsky story.)

Oliphant's argument is that left-leaning journalists and bloggers -- shockingly! -- are advancing arguments unfavorable to conservatives, a development that threatens civilization as we know it. He further argues that these non-conservatives are totally in the tank for the White House -- an argument belied by the existence of pieces critical of the administration or favorable to Republicans written by some of the people he names.

But even if Oliphant's characterization of what's going on were accurate, it wouldn't matter. Unabashed liberals have spoken with more or less one voice on various issues throughout the Obama presidency, in ways that echoed administration concerns -- and most of the time it was to no effect. The national minimum wage still hasn't been raised. Immigration law still hasn't been reformed. Federal gun laws still haven't been tightened. There's been no jobs bill. There'sd been no legislative remedy for the Supreme Court's gutting of campaign finance laws or the Voting Rights Act. And on and on. Liberals have tried to turn these into top-priority, unignorable issues on the national agenda, and have failed.

In large part, that's because liberals and Democrats don't have an effective noise machine. So even if everything Oliphant observes were the result of sinister collusion rather than just a shared set of beliefs, it wouldn't matter, because Dems and libs suck at messaging.

Except there may be an exception to that rule right now. What particular issue is sticking in Oliphant's craw at this moment? It's the political world's Topic A, of course:

When Jay Carney was grilled at length by Jonathan Karl of ABC News over an email outlining administration talking points in the wake of the 2012 Benghazi attack, it was not, by the reckoning of many observers, the White House press secretary's finest hour. Carney was alternately defensive and dismissive, arguably fueling a bonfire he was trying to tamp down.

But Carney needn't have worried. He had plenty of backup.

He had The New Republic's Brian Beutler dismissing Benghazi as "nonsense." He had Slate's David Weigel, along with The Washington Post's Plum Line blog, debunking any claim that the new email was a "smoking gun." Media Matters for America labeled Benghazi a "hoax." Salon wrote that the GOP had a "demented Benghazi disease." Daily Kos featured the headline: "Here's Why the GOP Is Fired Up About Benghazi -- and Here's Why They're Wrong." The Huffington Post offered "Three Reasons Why Reviving Benghazi Is Stupid -- for the GOP."

I think this is getting up Oliphant's nose right now because the Democratic/liberal message is actually getting through. "Benghazi is a circus" is already being talked about as a meme. A meme! Democrats actually got something to be a meme! And there isn't even a presidential election going on!

If our message is getting through, I don't think it's because we now have a well-oiled noise machine. I think it's because we've hitched a ride on the GOP's noise machine. It's the GOP, after all, that made Benghazi the only issue we're supposed to talk about. So we're riding that propaganda wave with our own messaging (y'know, pretty much the way we did in the Lewinsky era).

Republicans execute propaganda campaigns with Prussian efficiency on a regular basis -- this happens so regularly that people like James Oliphant think it's some sort of natural occurrence, and not the result of strict message discipline throughout the Republican Party and GOP media outlets. It only starts to look sinister when Democrats pull it off, because that's rare. Who knows -- someday we may even manage to build a noise machine of our own. Though I'm not holding my breath.

IT'S "A FOR EFFORT" DAY IN THE PUNDITOCRACY

So what did I learn from pundits this morning? I learned that it's just plain unfair to attack presidents -- particularly Republican presidents -- for unconscionable acts if those presidents really, really meant well in their heart of hearts. First, let's turn to Matt Bai, who's written a Yahoo News column titled "So George W. Bush Isn't a Monster, After All":

The truth is that Bush was never anything close to the ogre or the imbecile his most fevered detractors insisted he was. Read "Days of Fire," the excellent and exhaustive book on Bush's presidency by Peter Baker, my former colleague at the New York Times. Bush comes off there as compassionate and well-intentioned -- a man who came into office underprepared and overly reliant on his wily vice president and who found his footing only after making some tragically bad decisions. Baker's Bush is a flawed character you find yourself rooting for, even as you wince at his judgment.

Bush "found his footing"? When?

Yes, I wince at Bush's judgment -- or, more precisely, at the consequences of his judgment. I wince at the thousands dead from his mismanaged wars, at the far greater number wounded, at the billions of dollars squandered, at the fact that the wars were put on a credit card to save his precious tax cuts, which I'm sure Bai believes were also kept in place because Bush cares. I wince at the lives driven off the rails to this day by a financial crash that happened while Bush chose to look the other way.

I don't give a goddamn that Bush cares. If you accept Bai's characterization of Bush -- that he was a decent guy who got in over his head, y'know, the way people do -- the point is that he's like a guy who sets up a storefront medical clinic in an underserved area even though he has no medical training and botches most of his procedures, often killing his patients or doing them some other form of permanent harm. Who the hell cares if someone like that is sincere? He's a menace.

And next we turn to Peggy Noonan, who tells us that Benghazi was much, much worse than Iran-contra, because Ronald Reagan meant well:

The Iran-Contra affair did not spring from low motives. There was no hope of partisan gain, it wasn't a political play.

All involved were trying -- sometimes stupidly, almost childishly -- to save lives, and perhaps establish a new opening with Iran. They had good reasons, but the actions were bad, and everyone involved paid a price.

Compare that with how the Obama White House has handled Benghazi. It's all been spin, close ranks, point fingers, obfuscate, withhold documents, accuse your accusers of base motives....

Right. No one involved in Iran-contra ever accused any accuser of base motives (cough OLIVER NORTH cough).

Bai and Noonan are telling us that the road to the Bush and Reagan legacies is paved with good intentions. We know where that road ultimately leads.


(Bai via Eric Boehlert.)

THE SWATTING OF THE PRESIDENT

At the Daily Beast, Ron Christie says Democrats are afraid of yet another Benghazi investigation because we fear it will reveal heretofore unplumbed depths of administration incompetence. Ed Kilgore laughs at the notion that Democrats are afraid:

When people in politics say stuff like this -- my opponents are making light of this issue because it secretly terrifies them -- I figure some serious self-deception is at hand. And that could be the case here. If Democrats are huddled quietly in the bars and opium dens where they conspire against America, confiding their fear of Benghazi! as the Rosetta Stone to all their nefarious schemes, I sure haven’t heard about it. Sometimes when people laugh at you it’s because they think you’re being funny.

Personally, I think there's reason to fear -- but not because of administration guilt. If screwing up embassy security were an impeachable offense, Ronald Reagan should have been impeached repeatedly. It's a dangerous world out there, and neither party has a monopoly on security failings.

What there is to fear, though, is the ability of Republicans to generate the illusion of unspeakable evil out of next to nothing. Voter fraud. Death panels. The Ground Zero mosque. ACORN. Republicans can inflict political damage regardless of whether they're telling the truth. It's like a political version of swatting -- faking an incident that sends a SWAT team to the home of an enemy. It doesn't matter that that person isn't really guilty of what the swatter told the cops is happening at the house -- the target can still get seriously hurt.

That's what Republicans do to their enemies politically. That's what they're trying to do now.

WELL, BOKO HARAM IS DESIGNATED A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION NOW -- HOW'S THAT WORKING OUT?

As we learn from Josh Rogin's story in the Daily Beast, Hillary Clinton's State Department decided not to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization. I don't know the reason for this. I do know that the State Department under John Kerry reversed that decision in November 2013. So if a terrorism designation is such a huge deal, why is Boko Haram operating with impunity now? Why didn't the change of designation in the U.S. make any difference?

Maybe a small detail buried in Rogin's story is a partial explanation:

Had Clinton designated Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization, that wouldn't have authorized any increased assistance to the Nigerian security forces; such assistance is complicated by the Leahy Law, a provision that prevents the U.S. from giving weapons to foreign military and police units guilty of human rights violations.

That's an odd, muted way of introducing the fact that the Nigerian government under President Goodluck Jonathan is a human rights violator, as we learn from those dangerous radicals at ... um, the Council on Foreign Relations:

Until now the Nigerian government's approach to Boko Haram has been to mount an anti-terrorism campaign against it. Rather than use political methods to "win the hearts and minds" of the [poorer] northern population, it has relied on military force to counter Boko Haram's violence with violence. This "counter terrorism" has not worked. Boko Haram's human rights violations have been documented by credible human rights groups. More disturbing has been the extensive documentation of human rights abuses committed by the Nigerian military and other state agencies while engaging in their “counter terrorism” policy.

Actually, the report linked in that quote (PDF) documents abuses by both Boko Haram and the Nigerian government. On the government's side, there's this:

Nigeria's government has responded with a heavy hand to the Boko Haram violence. Government security forces, comprising military, police, and intelligence personnel, known as the Joint Military Task Force (JTF), have been implicated in serious human rights violations....

During raids in communities, often in the aftermath of Boko Haram attacks, members of the security forces have executed men in front of their families; arbitrarily arrested or beaten members of the community; burned houses, shops, and cars; stolen money while searching homes; and, in at least one case documented by Human Rights Watch, raped a woman. Government security agencies routinely hold suspects incommunicado without charge or trial in secret detention facilities and have subjected detainees to torture or other physical abuse.

In July 2009, at the outset of the violence, the police and soldiers in Maiduguri carried out scores of extrajudicial killings of detainees -- many of them committed execution-style -- according to witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch. Since then security personnel have detained suspects at several military and police facilities in Maiduguri, including in an underground detention center at Giwa military barracks, witnesses told Human Rights Watch. Soldiers have been implicated in detention-related abuses, including extrajudicial killings and torture. Members of security forces who have carried out alleged abuses have done so with near-total impunity.

The Clinton State Department did designate three leaders of Boko Haram as terrorists in June 2012 (a fact also downplayed in the Rogin story); the department's belief at that time seemed to be that Boko Haram as a whole shouldn't be placed on the terrorist list because it had different factions, some of them focused exclusively on Nigeria (which would mean they weren't involved in terrorist activity or planning against the West) and some focused outward. That was a belief expressed by the Nigerian government at the time. The government opposed designation of the group as a terrorist organization:

"We are looking at a dialogue to establish the grievances of the Boko Haram. I think the attempt to declare them an international terrorist organization will not be helpful," Defence Minister Bello Mohammed said on the sidelines of a meeting between South Africa and Nigeria in Cape Town....

"Boko Haram is not operating in America and America is not operating in Nigeria," said Mohammed. "They are not involved in our internal security operations, so I don't think it would be of much significance really in that respect. But we don't support it."

Secretary Clinton did meet with President Jonathan in August 2012 and offered a lot of assistance in dealing with Boko Haram:

Clinton spoke following high-level meetings with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and his national security team and government ministers. A senior State Department official said the United States offered to help Nigeria "harmonize" the efforts of its police, military and other security forces. A lack of coordination and information sharing between the various branches is said to be hindering the fight against Islamist extremist sect Boko Haram.

Another senior State Department official in the meeting said the Nigerian government was "very interested" in the proposal and that the United States will be sending a team to follow up. The proposal includes helping Nigerian security forces set up an "intelligence fusion cell" to better share information, based on a model used by the United States that it has shared with several other nations.

The State Department says the U.S. also offered to assist in forensics and post-attack inspections, as well as improved methods of tracking and arresting suspected militants.

In Rogin's story, a former State Department official defends the Clinton-era decision:

Inside the Clinton State Department, the most vocal official opposing designating Boko Haram was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, who served in that position from 2009 to 2013....

Carson defended the decision to avoid naming Boko Haram a terrorist organization in a Wednesday phone call with reporters.

"There was a concern that putting Boko Haram on the foreign terrorist list would in fact raise its profile, give it greater publicity, give it greater credibility, help in its recruitment, and also probably drive more assistance in its direction," he said.

The U.S. has plenty of ways to assist the Nigerian government with counterterrorism even without designating Boko Haram, Carson said. The problem has long been that the Nigerian government doesn't always want or accept the help the U.S. has offered over the years.

"There always has been a reluctance to accept our analysis of what the drivers causing the problems in the North and there is sometimes a rejection of the assistance that is offered to them," Carson said. "None of that has anything to do with putting Boko Haram on the foreign terrorist list."

And, as noted here, some Nigerian military commanders have actually appeared to be in league with Boko Haram.

So President Jonathan, who's from the resource-rich south of the country, seems to have struggled to reduce the poverty of the north. His government engages in human rights abuses in response to Boko Haram attacks. He's had generals who've collaborated with Boko Haram. And the U.S. is limited in the aid it can provide Nigeria, which doesn't always accept the aid and advice it gets from the U.S. The U.S. did offer aid, however, and designated three of the group's leaders as terrorists.

So maybe it was still a bad idea to withhold terrorist status from Boko Haram. But there's gray here.

HENNINGER: OBAMA INVENTED POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!1!1!!

This is the most paranoid nonsense Daniel Henninger has ever written, and that's saying something http://t.co/mo3HneAzKo

— edroso (@edroso) May 8, 2014

Roy is right about this Daniel Henninger column, which lists a series of fist-shaking events at college campuses that have had varying degrees of success -- you know, the kinds of things that Wall Street Journal editorialists have been complaining about for decades -- and concludes that they're all Obama's fault:

... All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life -- in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left's increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard.

("In politics and in government"? So you mean Democrats are going to win supermajorities in both houses in the upcoming midterms and vote to send all GOP members of Congress to internment camps? No? Oh, okay.)

Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers's speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left's long-sought replacement for the Vietnam War. Brandeis terminated its invitation to Somali writer Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam violated the school's "core values."

Azusa Pacific University "postponed" an April speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid "hurting our faculty and students of color." ... In a recent New Republic essay, Jennie Jarvie described the rise of "trigger warnings" that professors are expected to post with their courses to avoid "traumatizing" students.

Oberlin College earlier this year proposed that its teachers "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression." ...

I think it's fair to say something has snapped....

There's more, of course -- Brendan Eich, for instance. Also one undergraduate columnist denouncing one professor in the Harvard Crimson. Surely after that, tanks rolling through Cambridge are inevitable!

It's obvious that the far left has decided there are no longer constraints on what it can do to anyone who disagrees with it. How did this happen? Who let the dogs out?

The answer is not university presidents. The answer is that the Obama administration let the dogs out.

So I guess none of this sort of thing ever happened before. I guess, back when I was a Columbia undergraduate in the 1970s, I took the wrong drugs and had a hallucination in which students were protesting an offer of a teaching job to Henry Kissinger. My memory is that that happened in 1977 -- yes, that was before Barack Obama transferred to Columbia. (Or was it????)

So what was the Reichstag fire that gave the evil Obamaniacs an opening to unleash all this left-wing oppression, according to Henninger?

The trigger event was an agreement signed last May between the federal government and the University of Montana to resolve a Title IX dispute over a sexual-assault case.

... read the agreement. It is Orwellian.

The agreement orders the school to retain an "Equity Consultant" (yes, there is such a thing) to advise it indefinitely on compliance. The school must, with the equity consultant, conduct "annual climate surveys." It will submit the results "to the United States."

Wow -- worse than the Holocaust, the terror-famine, and the Cultural Revolution combined!

The agreement describes compliance in mind-numbing detail, but in fact the actual definitional world it creates is vague. It says: "The term 'sexual harassment' means unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature." But there are also definitions for sexual assault and gender-based harassment. All of this detailed writ is called "guidance." As in missile.

And we don't want the smoking writ to be a mushroom cloud!

Now, how did the University of Montana get into this situation?

... a ... federal investigation into the University of Montana came only after dedicated local investigations into a string of rapes committed on campus.

Hmmm ... tell us about those "dedicated local investigations."

An investigation ... by a former justice of the Montana Supreme Court found at least nine incidents of reported sexual assaults in 2010 and 2011 at the university. Most were apparently committed by students; few were prosecuted. Two more cases have been reported since then.

In one case, a Saudi exchange student was made aware of a rape complaint and was able to flee the country before a police report could be filed. In another case, the university's starting quarterback was able to resume football practice this spring despite the fact that a student said he had sexually assaulted her and that she had obtained a "no-contact” order against him.

The university “has a problem of sexual assault on and off campus and needs to take steps to address it to ensure the safety of all students as well as faculty, staff and guests,” former state Justice Diane Barz said in her January 2012 report. That report said prosecutions were difficult because of a reluctance by students and witnesses to come forward and file reports.

Yes, the entire Obama crackdown on freedom everywhere in America happened because of an investigation in Montana done by former Judge Diane Barz ... a onetime U.S. attorney for Montana appointed by President George H.W. Bush and, prior to that, a Montana Supreme Court justice appointed by Governor Stan Stephens, who was ... um ... a Republican.

She started it all -- obviously at Obama's behest!

Even retired Republican appointees are part of Obama's web of evil. A conspiracy so vast....

IS MEDIAITE'S TOP WINGNUT TRYING TO TURN THE BOKO HARAM STORY INTO PART OF THE "WAR AGAINST MALES"?

Mediaite right-wing apparatchik Noah Rothman says that, yes, it's a good thing that the mass kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria by Boko Haram is getting media attention:

This focus on Boko Haram from both the media and the government is an unqualified good. The press arguably increased the pressure on global governments to do something about this backwards group of terrorists.

But Rothman regards the newfound attention to Boko Haram as ... well, suspicious:

But Boko Haram is not a new phenomenon. It was not long ago that some -- including this author -- were asking why this group's atrocities were not generating any attention in the press.

On February 25, between 40 and 59 children were killed by the fundamentalist militant group. Early that morning, Boko Haram terrorists attacked a boarding school and shot many of children, aged 11 to 18, while they slept. Some of the students were gunned down as they attempted to flee. Others had their throats slit. In some buildings, Boko Haram militants locked the doors and set the building alight. The occupants were burned alive.

Rothman isright -- we should have paid more attention then. And why was that incident different, according to Rothman?

All of the victims were boys. Reports indicated that the young girls the militants encountered were spared.

That got hardly any attention in the Western media -- whereas, according to Rothman, the current kidnapping was an instant media phenomenon:

Since the Nigerian Islamic radical group Boko Haram kidnapped over 100 schoolgirls in mid-April, the media and the American government have been up in arms over this outrage....

Beginning the night of the kidnappings on April 16 and continuing ever since, the press has devoted relentless focus to the crisis in Nigeria....

Prior to Boko Haram's shift in tactics, from wholesale slaughter of young men to the kidnapping of young women, the group traveled from village to village where they killed children and razed buildings with near impunity.

... Apparently, the press simply needed the right reason to cover this terrorist group and their brutal tactics. But an even more disturbing question needs to be asked now: why did the press spring to action when young women were kidnapped, but were virtually unmoved when it was young boys who were being slaughtered and burned alive?

On Twitter this afternoon, I accused Rothman of trying to turn this story into part of the right's culture war -- specifically turning this into an example of media male-bashing. Rothman was, um, dismissive.

@nomoremister You're not a very bright person.

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) May 7, 2014

But if that's not Rothman's point, what the hell is his point?

Rothman is wrong, of course, when he says that the current story got saturation coverage in the Western press "beginning the night of the kidnappings." As has been widely noted, the mid-April kidnappings didn't become a major Western story until the beginning of May, when the social-media campaign that had migrated from Africa to the West finally broke through.

Yes, this story got Western media attention when stories of previous atrocities didn't. But there are a lot of reasons for that. This is a story that seems to have the possibility of hope -- the kidnapped girls could be rescued, whereas the murdered boys are, regrettably, lost. It's not as if Westerners have been unable to respond to the suffering of African boys: a memoir by former Sierra Leone child soldier Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone, was a huge bestseller a few years ago, and What Is the What, Dave Eggers's acount of the story of Sudanese "lost boy" Valentino Achak Deng, was also a bestseller. Those were stories of survival.

Beyond that, well, some things just go viral, and it's not clear why. No one worked social media after the earlier Boko Haram atrocities, just as no one drew the West's attention to Joseph Kony until the viral campaign that happened in 2012 -- and now most of the West has forgotten about Kony again.

That's just how these things work in a social media age. It's not an issue of gender. It's just happenstance when the online levers get worked in a way that gets a story noticed.

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF LIBERALISM, AIRING 24 HOURS A DAY, 7 DAYS A WEEK ON FOX

Prominent Americans no longer spread the notion that a secret cabal of Jews once hatched a plot for domination of the globe. Instead, America's contemporary conspiracy-mongers peddle tales of plots like this:

The wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney says she thinks the Clintons might have pushed the Monica Lewinsky Vanity Fair story to "get that story out of the way."

"I really wonder if this isn't an effort on the Clintons' part to get that story out of the way," Lynne Cheney said during an interview on "The O'Reilly Factor" Tuesday night. Would Vanity Fair publish anything of Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn't want in Vanity Fair?"

Would Vanity Fair publish anything of Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn't want in Vanity Fair? What, you mean like this?





(Vanity Fair's editor in 1998 was its current editor, Graydon Carter. He's had the job since 1992.)

Seriously? We're supposed to believe that Lewinsky would make these statements as a favor to the Clintons, who, it's safe to assume, are not exactly her favorite people? Or ... what? Vanity Fair just published this without Lewinsky's consent, out of blind Clinton loyalty?

Well, of course you and I aren't supposed to believe any of this -- but the rubes will believe anything the Fox snake-oil peddlers put in their sales pitch. It should be disturbing that the wife of a former vice president of the United States would engage in this sort of willful deceit, but engaging in willful deceit for ideological ends was what Dick Cheney specialized in as vice president, wasn't it?

This is what Republicans do now. This is what they are -- spreaders of disinformation, purveyors of the notion that everyone but their allies is engaged in a massive conspiracy that only they are brave enough to talk about. It's the Cold War, but we're the implacable, all-powerful enemy now.

IF ONLY A HIGH-PROFILE RIGHT-WING NEWS OUTLET EXISTED TO GIVE CONSERVATIVE KIDS SOME ROLE MODELS!

I see that this Chris Cillizza newsflash has inspired a predictable amount of self-righteous harrumphing:

Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That's far fewer than even a decade ago.

A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors....

These numbers will likely affirm the belief in conservative circles that "all" reporters are secretly Democrats....

This study has been conducted five times since 1971. The percentage of reporters identifying as Democrats has dropped, too, though not as much, while the number calling themselves independents has increased. Yes, the right thinks this proves the existence of media bias.

You know what could really turn this around? Imagine if right-wing kids could watch conservative journalists practice in real time. What if they could actually see journalistic conservatism modeled for them that way? How different everything would be if -- I know this sounds crazy -- a conservative channel were the highest-rated news source on American television. Yeah, I know -- crazy, right?

The existence of Fox News, and the fact that it's extremely successful in the ratings, should be an inspiration to right-wing wannabe journalists eveywhere. It isn't, though, for two reasons:

First, nobody at Fox News actually practices journalism. Nobody digs out stories, finds scoops, offers depth and perspective and background on what's happening in America and the world. It's all advocacy. There's no reporting.

Second, the Fox party line is that journalism is evil, even though, ostensibly, Fox is in the business of journalism. If the central news source in the right-wing universe tells its audience every day that the news business is in league with the devil, well, you can't be surprised when righty kids don't want to turn Satanic.

It's not just Fox. Why isn't there a journalistically serious right-wing newspaper in America? I'm not counting The Wall Street Journal, which has a rabidly right-wing editorial page, but is fairly moderate otherwise. Apart from that, there's nothing -- which is why even right-wing bloggers have to source their straight news, for the most part, to news outlets they routinely denounce as hopelessly left-wing. No one else does actual reporting. What prevented the emergence of a right-wing New York Times all these years? Why is there no right-wing ProPublica or Vox or FiveThirtyEight or First Look Media? Money? There are no rich righties who could have bankroll such endeavors?

Right-wingers don't go into journalism because they're propagandized to hate journalism. Don't blame liberals, or the "liberal media," for that.

OH, MONICA, DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO CHOOSE SIDES!

Monica, we're so confused! Each side is convinced you went public just to help the other guys!

hahaha fox news creating a conspiracy theory that vanity fair is pushing lewinsky to *help* hillary clinton. go home #thefive youre drunk

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) May 6, 2014

The return of Monica Lewinsky fits right in with the GOP's plan to take us back to their version of Clinton years http://t.co/a92Ir9x1K5

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) May 6, 2014

Instead, you tricked us by spreading the blame around:

"Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship."

But now every time we emphasize just the first part of that quote, the right-wingers are going to emphasize just the second part! You did that to us on purpose!

Also this:

"Any 'abuse' came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.... The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor's minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power."

You blamed everyone! You were supposed to blame one side or the other!

Don't you understand how everything works now, Monica? How can we have a proper multi-media fight about this for days and days if you won't take one side or the other?

RIGHT-WINGERS UNABLE TO PROCESS HOLLYWOOD BACKLASH AGAINST SHARIA LAW IN BRUNEI

For years it's been an article of faith on the right that liberals are softening up America for the eventual introduction of sharia law. So you'd think right-wingers would be pleasantly surprised at the fact that Hollywood -- the center of the liberal universe! -- is upset about Tinseltown ties to the government of Brunei, which just came under a very harsh sharia-based legal code, and would be full of praise for the entertainment community:

LOS ANGELES -- The response here to the planned imposition of Islamic law in Brunei, with extreme penalties for adultery and gay sex, has become more pointed in recent days as two Hollywood-related charities moved events from the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is owned by the Brunei Investment Agency.

According to the Deadline Hollywood news site, a fund-raiser on Wednesday for the youth organization Teen Line will be moved from the hotel to the Sony lot in Culver City, Calif....

Separately, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the annual “Night Before the Oscars” fund-raiser for the Motion Picture and Television Fund, usually held at the Beverly Hills Hotel, will now be held elsewhere.

The sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, last week began phasing in a new penal code based on Islamic law, or Shariah, that by 2015 will make gay sex and adultery punishable by stoning to death. The sultan's investment agency owns the Dorchester Collection, which manages a chain of hotels that includes the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Hotel Bel-Air and other luxury hotels....

Last week, the Global Women's Rights Awards, co-chaired by Jay Leno and his wife, Mavis, moved from the Beverly Hills Hotel to another location. On Monday, its sponsor, the Feminist Majority Foundation, staged a protest at the hotel, joined by Mr. Leno. Richard Branson, the entrepreneur; Tim Gill, a social rights advocate; and Ellen DeGeneres are also among those who have voiced support for the boycott....

Actually, no, if you have any sense you wouldn't think right-wingers would be pleasantly surprised at this, or that they'd be praising the entertainment community, because you know that right-wingers in America hate Hollywood and liberalism just as much as they hate Muslims. So the Free Republic reaction to this consists mostly of homophobic sneering, along with the suggestion that maybe sharia is appropriate for certain people:

Dude, it was the anal sex prohibition ...the Hollyweird gay mafia went apoplectic..

****

Nothing brings Hollyweird out like support for anal sex between two men.

****

BULL! Force Sharia law on Hollyweird. They're at the heart of leftist america so cram it down their throats and let them choke to death on it!

****

You know...you make a good point. Clooney, Penn, Damon, and Affleck should have to live under it since they seem to love diversity and coddle 0 o much...

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Maybe a few public stonings for adulterous relationships in Hollywood, would wake up some of the liberal Hollywood elite.
That plus an "honor killing" or two of promising young starlets, who attend a party at the Playboy mansion, would probably convince folks that Shari law belongs only in 3rd world countries, if anywhere at all.

In an earlier thread, the Freepers can't seem to pick sides in this fight at all:

Big whoop. Islam gets a pass by the Left because of their shared hatred of the West.

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Gala *snort*. Look, Muslims vs Hollywood gays calls for a mega popcorn run.

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Yup, let them go m.a.d.: mutually assured destruction.

It would be wonderful if we can get rid of radical islam, hollywood, and homosexuals by pitting themselves against each other.

It would be Reaganesque: We would win the war without firing a shot.

And over at Glenn Beck's Blaze, the commenters know who the real enemy is in this situation: Obama, of course.

In bed with our enemies.
Remember, barack insane obama bin laden bows to them and says he’s on their side.

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I believe Jesus. I believe God's word. The beast is Islam, and it's living prophet is Obama.

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this admin has been hostile to Christians and the Judeo/Christian values our country was founded on and are in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood -- who are in Ob's admin and who have the same values as the Sultan of Brunei !!! Our personal freedoms are going away one by one -- EVERY DAY!!

****

Watch out these are Anti-American Commie Muslim Terrorist Bin Lying Bama's relatives. Anyone wonder why Moosechelle the transvestite hasn't visited an Arab Country yet with her husband. Also you have not seen one photo of an Arab Leader, Bin Lying Bama and Moosechelle here in this country.

Well, that certainly puts the issue in clear focus, doesn't it?

EMERGING "LIBERAL MEDIA" NARRATIVE: SURE, THE GOP IS RUNNING A STAR CHAMBER, BUT WASN'T OBAMA ASKING FOR IT?

The benghazi inquisition might be a bigger deal than a lot of non-Fox viewers think because it's starting to get buy-in from the so-called liberal media. Yes, non-Republican journalists still think there's no crime involved and therefore no cover-up that should be actionable ... but, really, the White House committed a political error, didn't he? So, really, he had it coming, right? Therefore, if the GOP is going to paralyze the country with a phony constitutional crisis for the rest of this year --or the next two and a half years, or onward into infinity if Hillary Clinton is elected president but Congress is still Republican-controlled -- then it's as much Obama's fault as the Republicans', isn't it? Wasn't Obama asking for it?

So I saw this on Twitter from a Miami Herald reporter, enthusiastically retweeted by National Journal's Alex Seitz-Wald:

If WH wasnt so spin & secrecy obsessed, it would've 1) been more accurate re TP 2) disclosed emails sooner 3) not be dealing w/Benghazi now

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) May 6, 2014

I responded to this by noting that Hillary Clinton's book tour is coming up, so the GOP would have found an excuse to do this no matter what. Seitz-Wald replied:

@nomoremister @MarcACaputo sure, but new info confirms R's suspicion that WH is holding back, and suggests WH knew Rhodes email was damaging

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 6, 2014

Yes, but this line of thought easily morphs into the sort of "just world" thinking that partly absolves Republicans of responsibility for the fraud they're committing. It's as if these reporters are watching a kid get bullied in the junior high cafeteria and telling themselves that, after all, he does all those weird things, so of course he gets picked on. They lose perspective on what should be the unacceptability of what's being done.

And when we turn to The Washington Post, there's Dana Milbank saying the same thing:

If Republicans succeed in turning the Benghazi "scandal" from a nothingburger into a Double Big Mac, the Obama White House can blame its own secrecy and obsessive control over information....

As I've argued before, Benghazi doesn't qualify as a scandal because the Republican allegations, even if true, don't amount to much....

But the White House unwittingly gave the matter new life by disobeying the first rule of crisis management: Get all information out there, quickly....

On top of that, the whole flap over Rice and the "talking points" was caused largely by the White House's attempt to control tightly the dissemination of information....

A nasty cafeteria beatdown is now inevitable, and reporters and pundits are making themselves comfortable with the idea that it's going to happen, because acknowledging that sociopaths control half our government is too much to ask of them.

STACEY CAMPFIELD, CONGENITAL TROLL

Stacey Campfield did this? Why, I'm shocked.

On Monday, a Tennessee state senator apparently likened Obamacare's individual mandate to Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jews.

A brief post published at the blog of state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) read: "Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory [sic] sign ups for 'train rides' for Jews in the 40s."

Many of the people who've written about this have carefully preserved the post in a screen shot, in case Campfield pulls it down. He hasn't -- and he won't. He's an obsessive-compulsive troll. This is what he does. This is what he lives for.

As I wrote in 2011:

This is a guy who once introduced a bill requiring death certificates for all aborted fetuses. He later introduced a bill that would deny birth certificates for children of undocumented immigrants. (It probably won't surprise you when I tell you that he and three other Republican legislators were among the first to demand to see Barack Obama's birth certificate -- this was less than month after Obama's inauguration.)

Campfield has declared that Michael Vick's dogfighting activities weren't nearly as bad as abortion. He has filed legislation demanding that institutions of higher learning adhere to David Horowitz's so-called academic bill of rights. He's filed legislation that would require federal law enforcement agents to get permission from a local sheriff or attorney general before making an arrest.

And although he's white...

... he once tried to join Tennessee's Black Legislative Caucus; when he was denied membership, he compared the Caucus to the Ku Klux Klan, arguing that the Klan doesn't restrict membership by race. (In fact, the Caucus will grant "honorary membership" to "those persons whose belief and actions contribute to the purpose for which this caucus was formed"; given the fact that Campfield's voting record in Tennessee includes a vote against the Tennessee Rosa Parks Act, which would expunge the convictions of those whose crimes were challenges to segregation, I don't believe he qualifies.)

I wrote that when Campfield was making his annual push for a bill that would make it illegal to discuss any sexual behavior other than heterosexuality in grades K-8, even with children of gay parents. (The bill had died every year before 2011, and has continued to do so.) The Washington Post also reminds us of this bit of trolling:

Almost exactly a year ago, he posted a photo of an "Assault Pressure Cooker" prefaced by the words "Here comes Feinstein again."

That post was widely criticized for apparently making light of the Boston Marathon bombings, in which pressure cookers were used as explosives. He later explained on CNN that he was using it to make a point: calling for gun control after a tragic event was like calling for pressure cooker control in the aftermath of the bombings.

What do you know? He never took that post down, either.





This is what passes for wit among Republicans. It's also what passes for responsible public service.

BOTH SIDES DO IT! (THOUGH ONE SIDE DOES IT MUCH MORE)

A study of Supreme Court rulings on speech yields this headline in The New York Times:

"In Justices’ Votes, Free Speech Often Means 'Speech I Agree With.'"

Notice that this is presented as a general principle that applies across the ideological spectrum:

... In cases raising First Amendment claims, a new study found, Justice Scalia voted to uphold the free speech rights of conservative speakers at more than triple the rate of liberal ones. In 161 cases from 1986, when he joined the court, to 2011, he voted in favor of conservative speakers 65 percent of the time and liberal ones 21 percent.

He is not alone. "While liberal justices are over all more supportive of free speech claims than conservative justices," the study found, "the votes of both liberal and conservative justices tend to reflect their preferences toward the ideological groupings of the speaker."

Yes, but among current and recently retired justices, the votes of the conservatives are far more biased in favor of conservative speakers than the votes of liberal justices are in favor of liberal speakers. The Times gives us a bar graph (excluding Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, who don't have a sufficiently extensive record to measure). We're told that the key point is that "both conservative and liberal justices are more likely to vote in support of speakers if they share their ideology." But look at the skews:





Or in numerical form, from the original paper (PDF):

For Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts, the gap is massive. Even Kennedy is a third more likely to back a conservative speaker than a liberal one. For Ginsberg, the gap isn't nearly as large, and for Breyer there's barely a gap at all.

The Times story, by Adam Liptak, sets out to explain what's going on:

Social science calls this kind of thing "in-group bias." The impact of such bias on judicial behavior has not been explored in much detail, though earlier studies have found that female appeals court judges are more likely to vote for plaintiffs in sexual harassment and sex discrimination suits.

Lee Epstein, a political scientist and law professor who conducted the new study with two colleagues, said it showed the justices to be "opportunistic free speech advocates."

Yes, but ... isn't one side a tad more "opportunistic" than the other? Could you just say that?

Nope:

The largest [gap], at least among members of the Supreme Court who cast more than 100 votes in free speech cases since 1953, belongs to Justice Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas is not far behind. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. have not cast enough votes for a reliable appraisal, but the preliminary data show a similarly significant preference for conservative speakers.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the current court's most reliable free speech vote, favored conservative speakers by a smaller but still significant margin.

The Roberts court's more liberal members "present a more complex story," the study found. All supported free expression more often when the speaker was liberal, but the results were statistically significant only for Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010.

In the case of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the difference was negligible. And it is too soon to say anything empirically meaningful about Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Um, is that "a more complex story"? It seems fairly simple to me: the more liberal justices show a modest liberal bias, while the four dyed-in-the-wool conservatives are unabashedly biased toward their side. There's no comparison.

So why not say so in plain English?

LOOK WHO'S CALLING THE TROOPS BABY-KILLERS NOW

Thank you again, Aimai and Yastreblyansky, for filling in while I was away. I owe you.

*****

Every elderly Fox News viewer "knows" that filthy lefty hippies spit on troops returning home from the Vietnam War. Is there hard evidence of this? Little or none. But they all know it's true.

In recent years, the anti-war left has worked hard not to blame the troops for ill-advised wars. But as The New York Times reports today, some war opponents haven't learned that lesson -- and, curiously, they're the one who agree with those elderly Fox viewers on a lot of issues:

... in charming Keene, [New Hampshire,] ... parking officers figure in a philosophical tug of war between a small band of activists who live by the motto "Free Keene," and the great majority of residents who were unaware that their city was in bondage.

Keene's two parking officers, both women, are often videotaped by young adults known as "Robin Hooders." They track the whereabouts of the officers by two-way radio, feed expired meters before $5 tickets can be written, and leave a business card saying that "we saved you from the king's tariff."

... They are part of a broader effort by about two-dozen activists, most of them from someplace else, to unshackle Keene from the "violent monopoly" of government and its enforcers....

The mundane matter of parking has become so contentious that a third parking officer, an ex-soldier who served in Iraq, quit last year because, he says, he could no longer take the close-up videotaping and the taunts that "I had condoned the droning of brown babies." ...

This shadowing of parking enforcement officers has received the most publicity by far. Videotapes show the officers being dogged by activists who sometimes goad with pleasantries like: "How do you live with yourself?" ...

"They would try to make comments to bait me about my faith, about my military status," Alan Givetz, the ex-soldier, recalled recently. He said that he tried being nice, then oblivious, then angry, but to no avail.

Finally, Mr. Givetz, who served 22 months in Iraq as a military police officer, quit his job handing out parking tickets. "I couldn't take it anymore," he said. "I didn't see an end in sight."

[Ian] Freeman denied that he and his colleagues have harassed anyone. But he noted that enduring verbal and mental abuse is part of the officers' job description. "If it's too stressful," he said, "maybe it's not the right job for you." ...

There are a lot of cops in America who deserve to have this sort of anger directed at them. There's plenty of abusive policing in this country. But officers lawfully handing out five-buck summonses for meter violations don't deserve the emotional equivalent of abortion-clinic harassment. ("How do you live with yourself?")

These guys (and they're nearly all white guys, as the Times story notes, not that that's any surprise) are affiliated with the so-called Free State Project -- an effort to flood New Hampshire with out-of-state libertarians and then start working to convert the state to a libertarian paradise, whether longtime residents want that or not. The "Free Keene" folks, of course, dispense with the process of dismantling government by legal means and just try to do it by (ahem) fiat. They decide for themselves which laws are legitimate (the pseudonymous Ian Freeman is a Floridian who hasn't paid federal taxes in a decade) and enforce that judgment through intimidation. So they're basically dudebro Cliven Bundys.

This shows up in the Times on the same day the paper gives us a story about full-time presidential candidate and part-time U.S. senator Rand Paul kissing Rupert Murdoch's ring at the Kentucky Derby. News coverage of Washington insiders is generally the worst aspect of the Times, and this story is Politico-breathless about Paul:

For more than a year, Mr. Paul has been the most interesting man in Republican politics. His efforts to expand the Republican Party, and distinguish himself as a presidential candidate, have led him to reach out to constituencies that are not usually in the party’s sights. That, and a confluence of issues that have played to his strengths, have resulted in Mr. Paul being the hottest ticket in politics.

A lot of insiders think Kids Today are disappointed with President Obama, and thus are no longer liberal or Democratic -- libertarianism is what's fashion-forward these days. Well, if Rand Paul wins the New Hampshire primary, it'll be with the help of a fair number of kids who feel entitled to decide for the rest of us whether government exists. I'm sure Rupert Murdoch would be cool with that, as he was cool with Cliven Bundy before Bundy starting talking about "the Negro" -- the anarchy isn't going to reach Murdoch's penthouse. Murdoch still wants a muscular foreign policy, and that will be a bone of contention, but if that all gets worked out, maybe this is the future.

TV criticism

I did not much like the fat-shaming (Christie), gay-shaming (Graham), and Botox-shaming (Pelosi) in Joel McHale's routine, or in general the lazy dependence on celebrity names (Biden, Kardashian) as a substitute for jokes that has largely taken over the whole field of standup in the last couple of decades (including of course Maureen Dowd's column in the Times, though I have no evidence she actually writes it standing up). And there was something about the delivery that sounded as if he were really just using the occasion to try out material he was hoping to use in a more important gig, although I hear from TV watchers that in fact that's a part of his regular persona, to make a troll face at the audience after a particularly weak line ("U mad bro?")—suggesting that it's our mistake rather than his: It's just so not edgy on our part that we expect all the jokes to make us laugh instead of appreciating their formal qualities, like fashion yahoos who are less concerned with the social criticism of the clothes than whether they look nice, and that a really hip audience somewhere else will understand better what he's up to.

That said, there was a lot of stuff to admire, including a well-taken jab riffing off the president's wit:

"My favorite was when you said you’d close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay," McHale said. "That was hilarious… hilarious."

I thought he hit some of the sophistication he was aiming at when he turned a (needed) apology for the Christie fat jokes into a much more trenchant and funny series of gags on Christie's memorably dreadful January 9 press conference, though like the press conference it went on longer than it should have:

I am sorry for that joke, Governor Christie. I  did not know I was going to tell it, but I take full responsibility for it. Whoever wrote it will be fired. But the buck stops here. So I will be a man and own up to it just as soon as I get to the bottom of how it happened because I was unaware it happened until just now. I am appointing a blue-ribbon commission of me to investigate the joke I just told. And if I find any wrongdoing on my part, I assure you I will be dealt with. I just looked into it. It turns out I am not responsible for it. Justice has been served.

He was kind of funny on the subject of CNN, though Obama's joke was much funnier and better pointed:

I am happy to be here, even though I am a little jet-lagged from my trip to Malaysia -- the lengths we have to go to get CNN coverage these days! ... I think they're still searching for their table.

The president was also very funny and sharp on the subject of Rand Paul and his short friendship with the millionaire welfare sponge Cliven Bundy:

"I haven't seen somebody pull a '180' that fast since Rand Paul dis-invited that Nevada rancher from this dinner."

"As a general rule, things don't like end well if the sentence starts, 'let me tell you something I know about the Negro.' You don't really need to hear the rest of it. Just a tip for you -- don't start your sentence that way."

Obama has a kind of audience-trolling tic too, but he uses it in a different way, in a sort of innocent wonder at how cool he's just been—"Whoa, did I really say that?"—and it's endearing. On the more philosophical issues raised by the White House Correspondents' Dinner, I refer readers back to my piece on last year's edition.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Believe in Inequality? Why, I've Seen It Done.

Interesting David Leonhardt article about Piketty's theory of inequality.

So I called Piketty at his office in Paris, and he agreed to walk me through it.

He suggested imagining a hypothetical village from centuries ago in which neither the population nor the economy was growing. Every year, the village produced the same amount of goods for the same number of people to divide — a reality that was typical before the Enlightenment, when material living standards and human longevity barely rose. (The peasants of the 15th century were not better off than peasants in ancient Rome.) Even in a zero-growth society, however, assets that helped people produce goods — also known as capital — had value. Capital, Piketty told me, counts as anything “useful, any kind of equipment. Basic tools. Stones in prehistorical times.” Anything, in other words, that “makes people more productive.”
In our hypothetical village, a large farm might produce $10,000 worth of crops in a year and yield $1,000 in profit for its owner. A small farm might have the same 10 percent rate of return: $1,000 in annual crop sales, yielding $100 in profit. If the large farmer and small farmer each spent all of their money every year, the situation could continue ad infinitum, Piketty said, and the rate of inequality in the village would not change.
But one of capital’s great advantages is that its owners can make enough income to spend some of their money and sock the rest of it away. If the large farmer saved $500 of that $1,000 profit, he could buy more capital, which would bring more profit. Perhaps a few owners of smaller farms had debts to pay, and one of the large farmers bought them out. Eventually, the owner of the expanding farm might find himself owning land that yielded $1,500 or $2,000 in annual profit, allowing him to put aside more and more for future capital acquisitions. Less-stylized versions of this story have been playing out for centuries.
I have come to think of this idea as Piketty’s First Law of Inequality. The fact that the rich earn enough money to save money allows them to make investments that other people simply cannot afford. 

As I was reading about this imaginary village I realized I'd lived in just such a village, in Nepal 25 years ago.  And it was obvious how a basic inequality of capital influenced inequality of outcome.  I lived in a big house, owned by a wealthy family, in a region where people produced for subsistence.  The biggest inputs after land itself was seed, water, and human labor (performed largely by family members and especially women family members.)  Large families had more labor, but large families also tended to divide land and end up with smaller plots.  Wealthy families farmed their land by hiring labor from poorer families.  This was done with a combination of money and manipulation of important local inputs like food, seed, water, loans, gifts, and social connections.  A wealthy family, like my family, could afford to loan out food and to hoard seed in return for labor at a season in which labor was in demand.  Poor families, which needed that labor themselves, needed food or seed during other parts of the year. An underdeveloped market for other products, no ready cash, no banking system other than loans extended by rich families, meant that they had to trade what they had (labor) in exchange for necessities when their bargaining power was low.   Even where poor families owned something of value--land, gold, labor--the leverage that wealthy families had over poor families was the ability to time their transactions.  Larger amounts of something desirable (land, gold, labor, power, seed, water, government connections) meant that wealthy families could use their surplus at seasonally or socially critical times to force access to labor at other critical times at a price they preferred.  Sound familiar?

So why isn't it inevitable?  Well, lots of things can break into the system--new technology can replace family technology and make small families more productive (so they don't have to split their land up among too many children).  New sources of off farm employment can arise--in the case of Nepal, in the old days, men who went off to serve with the Gurkhas could send cash back to buy new land, in new locations, or to employ laborers to take their own place in the system. Each of these influxes of cash money into the economy disrupted the control of the former elites.  Education which created new choices for elites other than farming drew elite families out of the village entirely and rendered farming and control over the farming economy irrelevant.  For an interim period, before the collapse of the farming economy, foreign seed banks and low cost loans also intervened between local elites and their control over the labor economy.  No system has to stay at the equilibrium preferred by the elites. As Leonhardt and Piketty both argue rising inequality is a choice.

Cross posted at I Spy With My Little Eye

SO, HOW CLOSE TO HILLARY'S PUBLICATION DATE WILL THE BENGHAZI SELECT COMMITTEE'S FIRST MEETING BE?

So John Boehner is going to convene a select committee on Benghazi: This seems logical:

Renewed Benghazi push best evidence thus far that Obamacare is dying as a GOP issue for 2014

— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) May 2, 2014

Then again, why does this help the GOP in 2014? Sure, it seems designed to rile up the base -- but base voters (as opposed to the rest of us) are already in (to use Charlie Pierce's phrase) "a permanent state of rile" with regard to Benghazi (Obamacare too, for that matter). They couldn't be more motivated to vote than they are now. Where's the potential gain? And how do you tar Democrats in the House and Senate with the alleged misdeeds of the executive branch?

So I see the 2014 connection, but I wonder if this has more to do with 2016. After all, this anouncement comes five and a half weeks before the publication date for Hillary Clinton's new book, which is June 10. Think Boehner's crew might manage to convene the week of June 9? Or do something high-profile that week to try to steal Hillary's thunder, and to put her book tour under a big Benghazi cloud? I don't know how fast these things tend to happen, but we'll sure be talking about Benghazi all that week, and in the weeks to come, if Republicans have anything to do with it.

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And on that note, I'm out out here for the weekend. There'll be guest bloggers here, though, so stop by. See you Monday.

WE TRIED THAT, PEGGY

Here's Peggy Noonan writing from Rome, where she watched two popes become saints this week and then sat down to write, as usual, about how awful President Obama is:

To be in Europe is to realize, again and at first hand, that America has experienced a status shift. Europeans know we are powerful -- we have the most drones and bombs and magic robot soldiers -- but they don't think we are strong. They've seen our culture; we exported it. The Internet destroyed our ability to keep under wraps, at least for a while, our embarrassments. People everywhere read of our daily crimes and governmental scandals. The people of old Europe thought we were great not only because we were wealthy but because we were good. We don't seem so good now. And they know we're not as wealthy as we were.

In these circumstances it would be quite wonderful to have a leader who is a deeply believing enthusiast who could tell the world -- and us -- that we can, and will, turn it all around.

You know what? We had a leader like that not long ago. Was he a deeply believing enthusiast? Oh yes -- until his last day in office. Did he look at our problems and tell America and the world that we could, and would, turn things around? Oh, absolutely. He said that all the time.

His name was George W. Bush, and if you think Europeans liked America more in his second term than they do in Obama's, well, take a look at Pew's numbers:





Compare 2013 to, say, 2006, and the favorability of the U.S. is improved in every European country that was surveyed in both years.

But who are you going to believe -- a respected polling firm doing multiple scientific surveys? Or Peggy Noonan picking up gut impressions from her contact with a totally unrepresentative sample of extremely Catholic Europeans?

****

Noonan goes on to lament Obama's failure to rally the American public around ... well, here, let her explain:

How wonderful it would be to see an American president appreciate all the possibilities of becoming a great energy-producing nation -- all the new technologies and jobs, all the rebound they'd bring. To have a leader who feels and conveys a palpable joy in the transformative nature of this new world. Instead what we see is a ticket-checking approval, coupled with a wary, base-pandering, foot-dragging series of decisions such as the latest delay of the Keystone pipeline. It looks like a kind of historical lethargy, or listlessness.

Renewing the optimism of a dispirited America by singing the praises of the nation's industrial might? What I love about Noonan's idea is that it's just so .... communist.





But wait: Noonan's calling for a president who "conveys a palpable joy" when he sees an oil derrick? I've got it: she's endorsing Rick Perry!

Oh, my goodness -- first James Carville called him a dark horse, then Dick Morris said he could make a comeback in 2016, and now this. It's Perrymania! We have a new front-runner!

DO RIGHT-WINGERS EVEN GIVE A CRAP ABOUT THE ACTUAL BENGHAZI INCIDENT?

The New York Times story on the latest Benghazi revelations, or non-revelations, is titled "Email Suggests White House Strategy on Benghazi." The Fox story is titled "'Smoking Gun' Benghazi Email Prompts Renewed Push for Select Committee." So the email is a "smoking gun," hunh? I guess it must be, because the entire right is saying so.

But if it's a smoking gun, it isn't a smoking gun revealing the mishandling of foreign policy; it's a smoking gun revealing (in the view of right-wingers) the mishandling of electoral politics.

Yes, the wingers do piously intone the phrase "four dead Americans" now and again. It's an effective way of scoring self-righteousness points. Yes, they cheer when someone is trotted out who says more should have been done to save those four Americans. (The latest such voice belongs to a retired general who was in Germany during the attack, and who has admitted that he doesn't actually think more could have been done.)

But for the most part, right-wingers keep sidestepping the incident itself and focusing on the preparation of talking points after the fact. The newly released email that's supposed to be the "smoking gun" shows that White adviser Ben Rhodes participated in the shaping of the early talking points (though as Dave Weigel notes, Rhodes's suggestion that the talking points should refer to the Innocence of Muslims video as the inspiration for the attack merely echoed what the CIA had already recommended saying about the situation; the CIA had already removed a reference to Al Qaeda from the talking points).

For the right, this isn't about the attack -- it's about how the White House talked about the attack. The alleged crime is a couple of weeks of bad messaging. Now, because we all have the Watergate template in our heads, we're supposed to think that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" -- but in the incident itself there's no crime. Call it a policy failure if you want, but the wingers and the congressional GOP have done a terrible job of finding anything worse than bad judgment in Benghazi, however awful the consequences -- bad judgment followed by messaging that didn't match what we now know to be the truth for a few weeks.

It matters to them because it happened during a presidential campaign that the president won. Omigod! A candidate running for reelection put the best possible spin on something he did in office -- temporarily!

I have to confess that I've never understood the reason why Team Obama would want to downplay Al Qaeda involvement and ascribe the violence to spontaneous Islamist rage. To people with a thorough grounding in the subject, those are very different things -- but to the average American, they're indistinguishable: a group of Muslims angry with America rise up and act, and Americans die. It all looks the same to Mr. and Mrs. Average American. And it's not a surprise. It doesn't make bin Laden less dead -- Obama got credit for the kill, and for (slowly) extricating troops from the region, but every American knows that there are people out there in that part of the world they find incomprehensible who want to kill U.S. citizens, and frequently do. (It wasn't until after the election that we had our first month without a troop death since 2001.)

The Obama team tried to finesse the explanation of what happened for a while, in a way that played on distinctions the Obamaites were too wonky to realize most Americans don't make. And since then the right has been beside itself less because of the deaths than because of the way this was messaged during the campaign.

I'm not bringing that up because I think "both sides do it." Republicans are using Benghazi as a tool to paralyze the government. They might try to impeach Obama over it -- though I think they're much more likely, especially if they regain control of the Senate this year, to try to conduct a two-year "preemptive impeachment" of Hillary Clinton. All of that is much, much worse for the country than anything the Obamaites have ever done.

Maybe a star-chamber pseudo-trial of Hillary will at least return the GOP Javerts to the subject of the actual event. But for now they just seem to care about the politics. The incident itself, right now at least, seems irrelevant to them.

FOX AND POLITICO HAVE THE SAME PECULIAR IDEA ABOUT WHAT CONSTITUTES COWARDICE

Compare and contrast:







Sensible people, including people who aren't crazy, angry lefties like you and me, realize that climate change is real, and thus understand that Scientific American editor Michael Moyer was not being a "coward" when said he would never appear on Fox News again, after his proposal that he talk about climate change was rebuffed by the producers of Fox & Friends, who had booked him to appear on the show. He's not afraid -- he's simply choosing not to be in a place where he's not allowed to talk about what's important to him.

For this, Fox calls him a "coward" on the air. Oh, but we expect Fox to subject its critics to this kind of schoolyard taunting, because Fox is bellicose, sharp-elbowed, angry, and opinionated.

But Politico is ... respectable. Politico is sober, serious, thoughtful, and objective. Isn't it? I'm sure the people at Politico believe all those adjectives apply to them.

Politico's Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman tell us that Hillary Clinton has endured more than two decades of extremely nasty press coverage:

Over the 25 years Hillary Clinton has spent in the national spotlight, she's been smeared and stereotyped, the subject of dozens of over-hyped or downright fictional stories and books alleging, among other things, that she is a lesbian, a Black Widow killer who offed Vincent Foster then led an unprecedented coverup, a pathological liar, a real estate swindler, a Commie, a harridan.

Hillary Clinton has every reason to loathe the press. She's been treated by the press more or less the way believers in mainstream climate science are treated by Fox News. If she wants to keep the press at arm's length, that may be a tactical error during a presidential campaign, but, well, you can't blame her.

The point is, it's not done out of fear. And yet the headline asks, "What Is Hillary Clinton Afraid Of?" The story refers to her "fear and loathing" of the press.

The implication in that Fox chyron is that Michael Moyer is a pantywaist egghead who isn't man enough to get in the ring with tough guy Roger Ailes and his gang. The implication in that Politico headline is that Hillary Clinton keeps a wall of security between herself and the press because she doesn't have the courage to let her guard down.

That's as much of a grade-school taunt as what's on that Fox chyron.

I DO NOT THINK "FREEDOM OF SPEECH" MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

Sticking up for principle -- and doing it wrong:

In Bucks County, Pa., school board overrides student newspaper's ban on use of 'Redskins'

... A school board committee in Pennsylvania passed a policy this week that prohibits a school newspaper from banning the word from its pages, according to an article that appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times.

In October, the staff for the school paper, the Playwickian, voted to ban the word, which describes the school's teams and mascot. But on Tuesday night, a Neshaminy school board committee decided the newspaper does not have that right, with one board member citing the First Amendment rights of students who want to contribute to the publication. "If my son wants to write something proud about being a Redskin football player, the students on that paper, under the law, have no right to tell him he has to take the word 'Redskin' out of there," school board member Steve Pirritano said, according to the Courier Times....

The Playwickian's editor, Gillian McGoldrick, told the Courier Times that the newspaper's staff voted 14 to 7 to ban the word after conversations and research on the subject....

Um, no. You don't have an absolute First Amendment right to publish whatever you wnt in the school paper.

I'm sure right-wingers would cheer the committee's decision to nullify the staff vote -- but this is not very different from adult interventions in young people's lives that are routinely denounced by right-wingers, and blamed on liberalism. Right-wingers rail against the "everyone gets a trophy" approach to youth sports; this is basically "everybody gets an editorial policy." One of the lessons kids learn from school newspapers is how newspapers work. Newspapers have editors. Publishing decisions are made that don't please everyone. This is, more or less, a microcosm of the real world. (Maybe at another school there's a kid who can't get an article on Elizabeth Warren or the Robin Hood tax published because the editors reserve way too many column inches for sports.) And in this case, the policy was put to a vote. So let the kids have their policy.

This isn't a big story on the right, as far as I know. It might not break through unless there's an aggrieved young writer who's denied the chance to use the word "Redskins" in a story, at which point he or she will become a victim of totalitarianism ("First they came for the student journalists..."). (As far as I can tell, no actual student is claiming censorship.) There would have to be a villain as well, presumably an effete liberal editor whose family almost certainly like granite countertops.

I don't agree with what the committee has done, but I think it's legal -- in the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier case, the Supreme Court ruled that educators can impose restrictions on school-sponsored papers. The restrictions must be "reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns," the Court said. In the particular case in question, that meant censoring a student article on contraception, which was deemed inappropriate for fourteen-year-old students. What would be the "legitimate pedagogical concern" in this case? I'm sure the current Court, if asked, would think of something.

The paper's staff has already won a victory, however: the story in the Bucks County Courier Times ends this way:

Following the school newspaper's ban of the word "Redskin," the editorial boards of the Bucks County Courier Times and its sister papers, The Intelligencer and The Burlington County Times, approved a similar policy. The word will not be printed in the newspapers, used online or stated in video reports in reference to Neshaminy sports teams or Washington's NFL franchise except in stories dealing specifically with the controversy surrounding the name.

Well done.

Via Keith Olbermann, who weighs in here: