This just in (well, it is probably a week old or so, but hey): Channel Surfing ranks 17th among the state’s most influential political blogs, according to BlogNews.com. Who knew?
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You know the media is liberal when interviewers like Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America go after Michael Moore, questioning his contentions about media coverage in the run-up to the Iraq War, but allow Ann Coulter to run at the mouth unimpeded.
Consider this comment from Moore (from Crooks and Liars):
“My point is that had ABC News, NBC News, CBS News been more aggressive in confronting the government with what they were telling us back in 2003 about Iraq, you might have prevented this war. You, this network, the other networks,” Moore said. “Those 3,500 soldiers that are dead today may not have had to die had our news media done its job. … My point is that the media didn’t ask the questions.”
Moore’s point was pretty simple. The major news media didn’t approach their jobs with the proper level of skepticism. Was he impolitick about it? Perhaps. Was he wrong. Of course not.
But that did not stop Cuomo from going on the attack:
The simple fact is that the major media — both broadcast and print — allowed the Bush administration to control the debate, failing to question their assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs or links to terrorists. Basically, they failed us.
As for the Coulter appearance, which came about a week later, read this (from Raw Story — scroll to the bottom for video):
At the start of her appearance on Monday’s Good Morning America, Coulter briefly spoke about having been denounced by all three top Republican candidates over the Edwards slur, claiming that it didn’t show a “shift to the tolerant among the GOP,” since she was “denounced all over” for her words. The Godless author then blasted the media for focusing on statements by her, and not criticizing others when they make controversial statements such as the HBO talk show host and comic Bill Maher.
“Though, about the same time, Bill Maher said…and, by the way, I did not call John Edwards the ‘f-word,’ I said I couldn’t talk about him because you go into rehab for using that word,” Coulter said.
Good Morning America News Anchor Christoper Cuomo, a former political policy analyst for Fox News Channel, interrupted, “You said you were joking.”
“I wouldn’t insult gays by comparing them to John Edwards,” Coulter continued, “that would be mean. But about the same time, Bill Maher was not joking when he said he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack.”
Coulter then added, “So I’ve learned my lesson, if I’m gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he’d been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,” but Cuomo had no reaction to Coulter’s latest “threat.”
So, just to be clear, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” about as mainstream a news-magazine show as you can find, challenges Michael Moore when he criticizes prewar reporting, but allows Ann Coulter to blather on.
So what exactly is liberal about our media establishment, anyway?blogger Eric Alterman: “Waht liberal media?
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We are in the midst of a silly stretch as regards the governor’s so-called “monetization plan.” The plan, which would sell, lease or in some other way turn assets like the N.J. Turnpike or the state lottery into instant cash for use to pay down debt (primarily) has little support around the state, including in the state Legislature.
But a questionable inclusion in the state budget granting the governor money to study the plan (and the likelihood that the governor will not be presenting a plan until after the November elections) is drawing fire.
We received a press release the other day from Republican candidates for the state Assembly, Adam Bushman of Jamesburg and Tom Goodwin of Hamilton. (They have been very aggressive in sending out releases, more aggressive than their opponents.) Here is the text of the release:
State Assembly Candidates Tom Goodwin and Adam Bushman today criticized Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein for voting down an amendment that would have stricken a line item from the state budget during Thursday’s budget debate, authorizing the sale of state assets including the New Jersey Turnpike.
Goodwin described the move as being detached from New Jersey voters.
“This vote exposes how out-of-touch Assemblywoman Greenstein is with the families of the 14th District,” asserted Goodwin. “As I knock on doors, I continue to hear the same message: voters oppose selling the New Jersey Turnpike because it will lead to more toll increases. Ms. Greenstein should have followed the lead of Assemblyman Baroni in voting to strike from the state budget the provisions to sell public assets.”
During Thursday’s budget debate, Assemblywoman Greenstein voted against removing a budget provision allowing unlimited funding for “legal and engineering fees, financial advisers and other consultants and services associated with, as well as any other costs determined necessary in preparation for, the monetization, sale or lease of public assets.” (Section 75, FY2008)
Bushman called the vote “fiscally irresponsible.”
“Assemblywoman Greenstein’s vote to allow the sale of the Turnpike is bad for New Jersey,” said Bushman. “This is an election year ploy that gives the administration a blank check to sell off state assets while hiding the details of the deal from the voters until after Election Day. It is fiscally irresponsible to sell off our state assets and disconnected from the families of the 14th District.”
The budget line, as I said, did not authorize the sale, but only the study. But that matters little at election time. On the flip side, we have the Democrats’ release, issued today:
Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein and Assembly candidate Wayne DeAngelo today declared their unalterable opposition to any plan that would authorize New Jersey toll roads to be sold or leased to any private or foreign entity.
“Any plan that proposes giving control of New Jersey’s toll roads to a private profit-seeking firm is an absolute non-starter,” said Greenstein (D-Plainsboro). “Over the past 50 years, New Jersey built these roadways for the public’s use and with public’s money; they must remain in public hands.”
Greenstein and DeAngelo said they would vote against any plan that potentially could place the New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway, or Atlantic City Expressway under private or foreign ownership – either before or after Election Day.
DeAngelo said continuing public control over the highways is the only way to protect against unchecked toll hikes.
“Handing over our state’s vital infrastructure to any company whose primary concern is their stockholders is an open invitation to higher costs for commuters,” said DeAngelo (D-Hamilton). “Our highways should be operated with the interests of New Jersey’s motorists, not global corporate interests, as the paramount concern.”
OK. So the Democrats are opposed, as well. Then why not vote down the amendment? Simply, it was an election-year ploy on the part of Republicans, as most of this debate has been.
No one, aside from the governor, seems to think this is a good idea. But it certainly makes for good political theater.
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I got on the treadmill today — bad ankle and ridiculous humidity — and managed three miles in 26:30. Trying to see where the ankle is after last week’s minor sprain, trying to avoid overworking it, but once I start running it’s hard not to push. That’s why I took yesterday off and lifted, road the bike (10 miles) and hit the rowing machine (2,200 meters).
Tomorrow, lifting.
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Perhaps it’s time for Richard Cohen to retire. The Washington Post columnist today offers one of those silly retread opinions that purport to lend context to a difficult public issue by viewing it through the lens of history, but that badly misrepresents the historical record to make it fit his sense of what should happen now.
Cohen’s basic premise is that the Democratic presidential candidates are fighting with each other to see who can be more antiwar, which will lead to a candidate out of step with the majority of Americans. He then trots out the hoary cliche about soft-on-defense Dems and misrepresents the Nixon landslide to support his point.
The history I have in mind is 1972. By the end of that year, 56,844 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, a war that almost no one thought could still be won and that no one could quite figure out how to end. Nevertheless, the winner in that year’s presidential election was Richard M. Nixon. He won 49 of 50 states — and the war, of course, went on. Just as it is hard to understand how the British ousted Winston Churchill after he had led them to victory in Europe in World War II, so it may be hard now to appreciate how Nixon won such a landslide while presiding over such a dismal war. In the first place, he was the incumbent, with all its advantages and with enormous amounts of money at his disposal. In the second place, back then the Vietnam War was not as unpopular as you might think — or, for that matter, as the Iraq war is now. In 1972, almost 60 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war.
Maybe more to the point, most Americans did not endorse the way the Democrats would handle the war — nor the way the antiwar movement was behaving. Nixon seized on those sentiments and, in a feat that historians will be challenged to explain, characterized George McGovern as something of a sissy. In fact, the Democratic presidential nominee was a genuine World War II hero, a B-24 pilot with 35 combat missions under his belt and a Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest. Nixon, in contrast, had served during the war but never saw combat. He had, however, seen the polls.
Yes, he did. Cohen, of course, ignores a good chunk of real history, but he has a point to make.
It is among the Democrats that the war is a divisive issue — John Edwards sniping at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Obama sniping at Edwards and Clinton. Everyone now opposes the war, but the issue is not so much their positions as the intensity of their feelings. Antiwar Democrats in key primary and caucus states, particularly New Hampshire and Iowa, will not vote for a lukewarm antiwar candidate. This explains why Clinton recently reversed herself and voted to end funding for the war. The one Democratic presidential candidate from the Senate who did not was Joseph Biden. He said he opposed the war but saw no choice but to fund the troops.
Precisely right, Joe. But more than right, prescient as well. As if to suggest what an issue this will become, Rudolph Giuliani called Clinton and Obama’s vote a significant
flip-flop.” Since then the Republicans have mostly trained their fire on each other. You can bet, though, that if either candidate gets the nomination, this vote will be hung around Clinton or Obama’s neck, and the hoariest of cliches will be trotted out: weak on defense. It will have added resonance for Clinton because she is a woman.This is where history raises its ugly head. The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security. It is equally adept at saying so in the most scurrilous way. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001 — the entirety of Giuliani’s case for the presidency, after all.
Cohen avoids making an actual prediction, but his point is clear.
The problem with all of this, of course, is Cohen’s rather selective use of history. The simple fact is that 1972 and 2008 are alike only in that a presidential election campaign will be waged during an unpopular war. The basic facts of 1972 — incumbent president, cultural civil war, still simmering backlash by Southern voters against the Democrats — just don’t apply.
And while Nixon was not the most popular president in history, he was not as unpopular at this point in his presidency as we might thing. In April 1971, 19 months before the presidential election, he was still at about 50 percent in the polls, a far cry from President Bush’s minuscule ratings at about the same point in time. And September polls of the same year were showing that Nixon would best all three of the Democrats’ best shots — Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy.
And there is the not-so-small point that McGovern self-destructed, making bad choices for vice president, while the entire Democratic Party apparatus sat on the sidelines. That’s not likely to happen this time out (Democrats are still smarting from the 2000 election).
Cohen certainly is correct in reminding everyone that it is too early to write off the Republicans in this race. But his subtle attempt at swaying the Democrats away from their focus on Iraq is based on a misreading if history and is the kind of tired analysis that too often emanates from the Beltway.
A friend of mine once told me she thought there should be term limits for political pundits. Perhaps she’s right.
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