August 2008 Archives

SilentPatriot at Crooks and Liars reminds us how Karl Rove decided to attack Barack Obama based on the (false) assumption that Obama would make a solely political pick for the vice presidential nomination.

Back on August 10, 2008, Rove appeared on CBS' Face the Nation and declared:

With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa or Gilbert, Arizona; north Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town. So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?

Hmmm...I guess we know what Rove thinks of John McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin.

Make no mistake, Senator John McCain's surprise decision to pick Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is historic.

Think about it for a second: on January 20, the United States will inaugurate either an African American president or a female vice president. That is important.

Now, of course, people will wonder how Palin's selection will play out during this election. I suspect that as with most VP picks, the ultimate impact will be smaller than we expect.

But, I am worried that too much of the focus so far has been to attack Palin and not to put the ultimate responsibility where it belongs: on John McCain.

After all, John McCain has made "experience" the cornerstone of his campaign. We should focus on what this decision tells us about McCain's decision-making process. After all, as Media Matters notes, John McCain was the one who created such a high threshold for a vice presidential pick:

* On the April 1 edition of CNN's Situation Room, McCain asserted: "I think about whether that person who I select would be most prepared to take my place. And that would be the key criteria."

* On the April 6 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, McCain said of his selection, "[T]he first and really major and overwhelming priority is a person who shares my principles, my values, my priorities -- as you know, priorities are very important in presidents -- and could be -- immediately take my place. That's, I think, the overriding criteria." He added, "It is who can best take my place and carry on the agenda and the vision that I have outlined and will continue to outline during this campaign."

* In a July 8 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interview, when asked, "What kind of a vice president do you want?" McCain reportedly responded: "Someone who shares my priorities and my principles. And also obviously who is ready to take my place at a moment's -- you know, immediately."

Sarah Palin is widely acknowledged to be a rising right-wing political star. But can anyone argue that she is "most prepared to take my place?" There are many women within the Republican Party far more qualified to take office immediately -- but their pro-choice stances obviously disqualify them from consideration.

After this choice, can we finally drop the notion that the Republicans care mostly about national security issues? How can one argue that Palin got to the front of the line solely because more-qualified Republican women were disqualified because of their pro-choice views?

John McCain has made a political choice -- after claiming he puts "Country First." Conservative analyst David Frum put it well when he wrote:

Mr. McCain's supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency? Barack Obama at least balanced his inexperience with Mr. Biden's experience. What is Mr. McCain doing?

That should be the focus. What is going on here with John McCain. As Steve Benen notes:

Palin's qualifications are, to a very real degree, secondary to the issue at hand. What matters most right now is John McCain's comically dangerous sense of judgment. He picked a running mate he met once for 15 minutes, who's been the governor of a small state for a year and a half, and who is in the midst of an abuse-of-power investigation in which she appears to have lied rather blatantly. She has no obvious expertise in any area, and no record of any kind of federal issues. McCain doesn't care.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don't do things like this. Leaders don't do things like this. It's the height of arrogance. It's manifestly unserious. It's reckless and irresponsible. It mocks the political process. Faced with a major presidential test, McCain thought it wise to tell an imprudent joke of lasting consequence.

Sarah Palin is a rising star. Assuming she survives the active investigation against her focusing on abuse-of-power allegations, she likely would have risen to the top ranks of Republican Party power soon enough.

But today? It's just irresponsible. This decision should put into even greater doubt whether John McCain has the right judgment and temperament to be president.

Another major element of Senator Obama's acceptance speech I want to note focuses on his outstanding decision not to accept the radical Republican talking points that question Democrats' patriotism and fitness to conduct foreign policy.

You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice - but it is not the change we need.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans -- Democrats and Republicans - have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.

So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes!

For far too long, far too many Democrats have allowed radical right-wingers to push us around. To paraphrase Senator Biden's mom, it is long past time for Democrats to go back outside and rhetorically bloody the nose of those people who dare throw around such slanders.

I was honored to have the opportunity to sit in Invesco Field on Thursday night to see Barack Obama's outstanding speech. It was a moving night -- full of substance and ideas.

When I returned to the hotel, MSNBC was in the process of replaying the acceptance speech, and I watched it again -- and was relieved that it held up at least as well (if not better) on the television.

Obama's speech included many important elements. It had specific policies. It discussed clearly the insane elements of the Bush-McCain approach to foreign policy, It described the failures of the radical right-wing administration currently in office clearly and logically.

I want to focus initially on what Obama had to say about the "trickle down" and "ownership society" elements of the radical right-wing's governing philosophy. This part of the speech may not seem as important as a few others, but it since it strikes a blow against a core element of radical conservatism, it is vital to pause and take special note of it:

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.

For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.

Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America.

Amen.

Few Democrats have been willing to go here, much to my chagrin. For this is one of the issues most central to my decision to leave the Republican Party into which I was born.

We are not all a bunch of individual free agents who must face all of the risk on our own. We are a nation, a community. We can help each other.

People should work hard. They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But the government has a role to ensure people who want to work hard have boots.

It is long past time to push back against this radical right-wing notion of our society. I was so excited to hear Barack Obama begin that process Thursday night.

I brought my laptop to the Pepsi Center tonight in the hopes I might have a chance to write a bit -- at least before things get too crowded.

Those of you following my Twitter feed noticed my concern early last night that the speeches were not as strong as I had hoped.

The night, truly, was saved late by Senator Hillary Clinton. Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-Mont.) began to fire up the Convention a few minutes earlier, but you probably did not notice since the cable networks had their pundits talking rather than allowing viewers to watch the speeches from the floor. (Atrios is right: why do the networks spend all of this money to bring people to the Conventions when they seem to go out of their way not to cover the event?)

The best speech of the night was delivered by Senator Clinton. The expectations and stakes could not have been higher -- and she exceeded them. It is always something special to see a candidate connecting with an audience and with a moment.

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible

There is no way Senator Clinton could have made the case more poignantly. As Rachel Maddow said last night on MSNBC, "Anybody who could be persuaded would be persuaded by that speech...She nailed it."

Just how many of the impossible-to-persuade exist? It does not appear to be as many as the media reports to suggest. Reporters seem to be looking for any signs of discord.

Which is why I am so worried about the choice to hold a modified roll call vote today. State delegations started voting this morning, and the results are going to be released on the Convention Floor. But, there is confusion about whether Clinton delegates had been released to support Barack Obama. There are hard feelings about the odd, compromise process.

Managing this type of activity with political activists has great risks. I do not see why they could not have had a standard roll call. Let each state chair have their 90 seconds of fame. Start the day at noon to get things done and keep to the schedule.

My concern is that if Clinton delegates feel slighted about the vote process, then calls for unity will fall on increasingly deaf ears.

I hope I am wrong. I hope things will go smoothly. But I fear a demonstration against the vote process will give the pundits all the ammunition they need to feed the narrative of a divided party.

Process issues can bring down a political group. Such slights can create hard feelings that make the problems intractable.

Is the risk worth it?

Over at Hullabaloo, we are reminded (and warned) about how the Bush Administration responded to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: by sending Tim Ridge out on the Sunday afterwards to declare an orange alert:

Perish the thought. This was "specific credible information" and Sec. Ridge had no choice but to come right out that particular Sunday and deliver the grim news. After all, the information they had was, uh, three years old.

Ridge hadn't exactly divulged that the information was in their possession for a long time and was more along the lines of surveillance notes rather than attack plans. But any reporter -- or citizen -- with the ability to think rationally when the government screamed "TERROR!" might have noticed that this is a strange thing to see when you bring your camera to a building that's about to be attacked by al-Qaeda:

Naturally, when there is "specific credible information" that a building is about to be attacked, the Presidential Playbook instructs him to send his wife and children to the target for a photo op with the mayor and governor. Bush's decision was textbook.

Oh yes. One cannot stop a good photo-op. Too bad few people questioned this at the time.

Who knows what it will be this year. But it is a story to watch. This Administration, as Keith Olbermann has deftly explained, has a record.

I'm in Denver to watch the 2008 Democratic National Convention. I think I've figured out how to post from my Treo. I'll also be updating my Twitter feed regularly.

I decided to get up to speed with Twitter because I thought I might use it to post quick thoughts while I am at the Democratic National Convention.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder had a couple of gems about Joe Biden's selection as Barack Obama's running mate on his Twitter feed today:

Conspiracy theory: BO announced JRB at 3am b/c Biden's the guy you want answering the phone at 3am.

That would be quite a line -- and a call-back to the primary campaign. And it has the advantage of being a better explanation for the Obama campaign than having to admit they lost control of the announcement when all the preparations had to be made: like that report that the Secret Service had been dispatched to begin protecting Biden as the pick.

It was this detective work which allowed the "old media" to figure out the pick before the text message. As Ambinder notes:

Old media d. Text message in three sets. It was a squeaker.

It was close, but they still got it done.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Conservative-leaning Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters lays out the details.

Republicans posture as bulwarks against spending-crazy Democrats, but the hard facts prove otherwise. As a detailed chart published this week in The Sacramento Bee demonstrates, the two chief contributors to the state's chronic budget deficit have been spending that Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, championed.

State general fund spending has increased by some 33 percent over the last five years, from $77.5 billion in 2002-03 to $103.5 billion in 2007-08, but three-fourths of the increase can be fairly attributed to inflation (17 percent) and population growth (7 percent). That leaves about $7.4 billion in real spending increases.

The education, health and welfare spending that Democrats champion increased only slightly, if at all. Meanwhile, spending on prisons increased by $4.3 billion and payments to local governments to cover losses of revenue from license fees on cars account for another $3.1 billion. And who were the most adamant advocates for locking up more felons in prison (11,000 more over five years) and cutting those car taxes? Republicans.

Read the last paragraph again. It's that important.

Screaming "no new taxes" because Grover Norquist demands it is not responsible. Borrowing money from the future to live up to that pledge is not fiscally responsible.

"No" is not a plan.

In catching up on the week, I must highlight Glenn Greenwald's continued outstanding analysis of the unanswered questions created by the reporting of the anthrax terrorist attack "investigation." For example, the FBI presented us with this huge error:

In the documents that the FBI disclosed two weeks ago, it itself defined the "window of opportunity" for mailing the September 18 postmarked letters as beginning on September 17 at 5:00 p.m. (after which letters dropped in that mailbox would have received a postmark of September 18, but before which they would be postmarked September 17). Thus, based on the FBI's own facts, it would be physically impossible for Ivins -- as the FBI claimed to the Post -- to have driven to New Jersey after taking administrative leave in the morning in order to mail the anthrax letters, since he returned that day to Maryland for a 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. meeting, and thus could not have dropped the letters in the mailbox after 5:00 p.m.

That seems like a pretty sloppy error -- and one wonders just how many times our friends in the main-stream media are going to let their reporters uncritically act as stenographers of the talking points they receive. As Greenwald notes:

And let's just spend a brief moment marveling at how mindless and uncritical the establishment media is in how they report on these matters. It was The Post's Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick who first reported the FBI's leak on August 8 that Ivins had likely traveled to New Jersey after taking administrative leave in the morning, and they reported it without an iota of critical thought, and certainly didn't point out that the FBI's own timeline was impossible on its own terms. More amazingly, it was one of those same Post reporters -- Carrie Johnson -- who on Thursday printed the FBI's brand new and mutually exclusive theory -- that Ivins traveled to New Jersey at night, after work -- without even bothering to mention the most important fact: that it was a brand new theory that contradicted the one she mindlessly passed on from the FBI the week before.

The need for an independent investigation of the FBI's handling of the anthrax terrorism case gores more urgent by the day.

Ezra Klein writes another excellent post explaining just how myopic it would be for a potential Barack Obama administration to include Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Could we please stop buying into the radical right-wing meme that says we have to go to the daddy party to protect us? As Klein writes:

If Republicans say Democrats can't be trusted to handle national security, and Democrats keep turning to Republicans to handle national security, why should voters question the claim that Democrats aren't to be trusted on national security?

Ding! There are many Democrats who are up to the job -- and Obama, should he win, would do well to remember this fact.

I'm a couple of days late, but I cannot neglect to note just how excited I was to learn that Rachel Maddow is getting her own show on MSNBC starting September 8.

An actual liberal on the teevee? One who is witty and well-informed? Sign me up.

Josh Marshall's critique of John McCain's performance on the Georgian crisis is spot-on:

On the other hand, he really has gone considerably beyond what's ever been considered appropriate or acceptable for a presidential candidate. He's worked at fairly evident cross-purposes with the president of his own party. He's been in several times a day phone contact with one of the key players in the drama. He's dispatching his own faux diplomatic delegations to the scene. Probably it's all too much inside baseball to register with anyone who's not already watching closely and decided.

This is a mistake that shall have lasting foreign policy implications. McClatchy's Jonathan S. Landay reports:

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

"The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank," said a senior administration official.

He's only been president for over seven-and-a-half years. I suppose it is unfair of me to assume that a man who calls himself the commander-in-chief so much might have this basic part of military affairs and foreign policy figured out by now.

Sean at the must-read FiveThirtyEight.com offers a devastating analysis of internal Clinton campaign memos that show key advisors did not understand the basic rules of the Democratic Party's primary process.

This is malpractice. Clinton National Field Director Guy Cecil’s January 19 internal memo discussing February 5th’s congressional districts and the threshold numbers from gaining or defending the gain of an extra delegate is replete with error.

Set aside the malpractice of discontinuing polling in caucus states where the blind-flying Clinton campaign allowed Obama’s team to run up the score, this revelation shows that the Clinton’s HQ apparently did not have simple calculators.

Go read the details -- and let them be a lesson to future campaigns about the need to understand exactly how the process works.

Kevin Drum provides a great service by explaining what the "margin of error" in a poll really means. It does not mean, despite what all of us will hear over and over, that a poll with a result within the margin of error is a "statistical tie."

No. No. No. No. No. As Drum explains:

The idea of a "statistical tie" is based on the theory that (a) statistical results are credible only if they are at least 95% certain to be accurate, and (b) any lead less than the MOE is less than 95% certain.

There are two problems with this: first, 95% is not some kind of magic cutoff point, and second, the idea that the MOE represents 95% certainty is wrong anyway. A poll's MOE does represent a 95% confidence interval for each individual's percentage, but it doesn't represent a 95% confidence for the difference between the two, and that's what we're really interested in.

Drum provides a handy chart that allows a reader to look at the poll's margin of error and the percentage difference between the candidates and see what the chances are the person leading in the poll is actually ahead.

So, instead of Barack Obama and John McCain being "statistically tied" in the latest Pew poll, we can see that there is a 93 percent chance that Obama is actually leading McCain.

That's a slightly different story.

Matthew Yglesias is right: Attorney General Michael Mukasey has just given us a contender for best Bush Administration slogan.

In my post below about the anthrax attacks, I linked to a Think Progress video of John McCain's October 18, 2001 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman.

I was struck by McCain's first joke in this video to Letterman -- and wonder when people like McCain are going to be held accountable for the failure that joke represents.

“What is Osama bin Laden going to be for Halloween?” “Dead!”

Too bad Letterman didn't ask McCain for the year. McCain sure was proud of the joke, eh?

We are nearing the seventh Halloween since McCain's joke. Do we really think we should keep the same people in charge who have failed to capture bin Laden. Just to remind us all, it is now 2,512 days since President Bush vowed to get bin Laden "dead or alive".

2,512 days. And the clock continues to tick.

The apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, the FBI's lead suspect in the September-October 2001 anthrax attacks upon the United States, still leaves many vital unanswered questions about this now-often-overlooked but extremely important period in our nation's history.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is leading the charge to hold people accountable to answer some of these questions. In doing so, he reminds us that the anthrax attacks were (wrongly) linked to Saddam Hussein -- and helped the Bush Administration build its public case to go to war.

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

It may be hard to remember this -- especially during a time when so many people are so willing to say that our nation has not been attacked since September 11, 2001. But Greenwald is correct -- like many businesses, the organization for which I worked then purchased a supply of plastic gloves and prepared other procedures for opening and sorting mail. This had a huge impact at the time. It was immediate, and no one knew for sure when and from whom the next infected letter might arrive.

Greenwald then reminds us of the key role ABC News played in (falsely) linking the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein -- at a time when Americans were fearful about what the next attack may mean.

Clearly, Ross' allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really "well-placed," one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted -- Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It's extremely possible -- one could say highly likely -- that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain -- as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax -- is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).

Seven years later, it's difficult for many people to recall, but, as I've amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply -- by design -- into our public discourse and into the public consciousness. Those reports were absolutely vital in creating the impression during that very volatile time that Islamic terrorists generally, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically, were grave, existential threats to this country.

If you don't believe it, Think Progress has a video of John McCain making the point on David Letterman on October 18, 2001.

It is simply unacceptable for this story to go away. Is Dr. Ivins really guilty? His suicide does not close the book on the case--and he has defenders who are strongly defending him. Given what happened to Dr. Steven Hatfill, and the multi-million settlement the U.S. government paid after falsely accusing him of these crimes, we should not take initial media reports at face value.

Did the same government scientists who unleashed anthrax on our nation also leak to the media the false connection to Saddam Hussein? Who was warning journalists like Richard Cohen to purchase cipro before the anthrax attacks became public?

I know John McCain's ad linking Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to Barack Obama is fun. It may also be interesting to examine in detail every presidential tracking poll out there.

But the anthrax attacks are more important. This story must not be allowed to drop out of our consciousness before these questions find answers.

I wish infrastructure issues, like John at Americablog's discussion of our nation's comparably slow and costly internet, would be a bigger political issue.

Perhaps we should make note that John McCain has decided to flip-flop again now that is clear that he will try to mudsling and attack his way to the White House. As John Heilemann writes in New York Magazine:

Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath—some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character—we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.

As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. But that doesn’t mean they (and their inevitable successors) won’t prove effective, especially against an opponent with so little experience under ruthless and relentless fire. Before Obama hurled himself into the presidential scrum he’d never been hit with a negative ad—a point often raised by Hillary Clinton’s people. And though they made sure Obama lost his negative-spot virginity, the ads they ran against him were patty-cake compared with what he faces now. Hence the questions on which the general election may turn: Will Obama be capable of withstanding the pummeling the McCain forces have begun to unleash? Or, as Hillary privately predicted, will he crumple like a paper doll?

For those not keeping score, a quick review of the McCain campaign’s lunge for Obama’s jugular. First, its new slogan: “Country first,” with its inverse insinuation that Obama puts something else (i.e., his own ambition) ahead of the nation. Second, McCain’s accusation that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” Third, the McCain ad “Troops,” which claims that Obama, while in Germany, “made time to go the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops—seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” And, finally, the ad “Celeb,” with its intercut images of Obama in Berlin, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.

I guess we will soon see if how much BBQ and donuts will be required for the main-stream media to keep carrying John McCain's water -- or whether they may actually report that McCain is not going to live up to his promise to run:

"a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today."

I won't hold my breath. After all, donuts with sprinkles are yummy.

Over at Altercation, Charles Pierce analyzes the controversy created by a statement Barack Obama did not make -- a quote that was misreported and taken out of context in order to feed the main-stream media's "Obama is presumptuous" story line for a day. Pierce is rightly not pleased:

And, KO? You know I love you, but it was your pal Milbank who first flung this particular cow-chip, and it was your network, especially Ol' Squint and the Morning Zoo Crew, who hurled it even further into the discourse. Not for nothing, but this is the kind of thing on which Murrow would've called out his own people.

On stories like these, I am reminded of a friend from Belfast who once, while walking in Boston, was confronted by a man who said, "Give me your wallet. I have a gun." My friend replied, "Sir, where I come from, if you have a gun, you produce it," and then went on his way. It is insupportable as journalism to write as fact that which you merely suspect, regardless of how many other people suspect it, too. In fact, herself even has a name for the phenomenon. Apply the Kaus Rules to another story? Would it be supportable as journalism for me to write a piece assuming as fact that the Bush administration used its illegal surveillance powers to wiretap its political opponents just because a lot of people suspect, based on this administration's proven track record, that it probably did so? Could I get that piece into my newspaper? The answer to both questions is, and ought to be, no. If you have the gun, kids, produce it.

This is all of a piece with the godawful notion that we should write something because "perception is reality." No, no, no. F**k, no. If the perception is different from the reality, it is the obligation of the journalist to pound that reality, day after day, until the perception either conforms to it, or it falls away because it is untrue. We are not obligated to be conveyor belts for bulls**t just because a lot of people happen to believe it. If you have to use the phrase "if true" in discussing whether or not something is a legitimate news story, then it's not. And Chuck Todd? If you are talking about a news story and you use the phrase, "no matter how true or untrue the allegations," you're a hack and a fraud and should leave the legitimate news business immediately. Perhaps there's a job for you at Ye Old House Of Mulch for Brains.

You mean reporters can, you know, report instead of acting at stenographers for right-wing talking points? What a radical notion.