BY TOM TOMORROW
The Smoking Gun got their hands on Dick Cheney’s tour rider. (via HuffPo)
I’m guessing Tom is too busy with his tour preparations to plug a certain book that’s coming out today….
Don’t buy The Professors by David Horowitz
Seriously, it’s the same “radical professors” crap that conservatives have been whining about for years. We’ve seen this argument a million times before and it’s still as simple-minded as it was forty years ago. To conservatives like Horowitz, liberalism on college campuses is the result of political bias and intolerance for alternative views. While cherry-picked examples of political correctness run amok can certainly be strung together to support that thesis, there’s a more obvious answer that’s being overlooked by the egomaniacs on the right. When educated people disagree with you, it has nothing to do with political bias. They disagree with you because you’re wrong. If Horowitz and his peers had the slightest bit of humility, they’d take the unpopularity of their views among intellectuals as a sign that they might need to reevaluate their views. But that would require flip-flopping and we all know how wingnuts feel about that.
So now that you know which book you shouldn’t buy, lemme highlight part of what Giant Magazine had to say about Hell in a Handbasket :
It also showcases how infuriated he is with the current administration. We probably don’t need to tell you that Tomorrow’s opinions lean to the left–the book’s cover, which features President Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove sporting devil horns, speaks volumes. Yet he never falls into blind partisanship. Even as Tomorrow rips into the president’s buffoonery, his political advisors’ twisting of the truth and fox news’s insulting and divisive rhetoric, he comes off not as a vengeful sour-grapes Democrat but as an articulate and thoughtful man who is genuinely concerned about the future.
Daniel Perkins has been making cartoons for over 20 years, and his work has never been sharper. This Modern World stands out as a voice of reason, pointing out the trouble we’re in and providing comfort to those who already recognize it. Who knows–maybe someday we’ll be able to look back on all of this and laugh.
So pick up Hell in a Handbasket and catch Tom next week on tour.
For those of you who watched American Idol tonight and saw somebody in the audience cheering and holding a sign with a pickle on it, that wasn’t a photo of contestant Kellie Pickler, it was Associated Press hack Nedra Pickler :
Nit Picklering being the writing of news stories admonishing Democratic candidates for daring to not explain their own inconsistencies, as demonstrated by Nedra Pickler by the inclusion of some utterly irrelevant detail.
Matt Yglesias later expanded the Nit Picklering phenomenon into an article for the American Prospect :
Pickler, a 28-year-old Washington-based reporter who covered the auto industry before moving to the campaign beat last January, took Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to task for telling the story of a New Hampshire couple whose water supply was rendered unsafe for drinking or showering due to the presence of a gasoline additive, MTBE, without noting that they now, in fact, had potable water from an alternate source. Was Kerry remiss? Certainly no more so than Pickler, who failed to mention that the senator’s remarks came up as he was discussing the Bush administration’s efforts to shield manufacturers of the toxic substance from lawsuits. (MTBE has a propensity for poisoning groundwater). A revised version of Pickler’s story was released on the wires the next morning, now leading with the Kerry-bashing in the first paragraph, insinuating that the senator had inflicted emotional distress on the victims of his “dishonesty.” Actual harms caused by the chemical didn’t make the cut, however.
. . .
Pickler’s tic is a source of amusement, but it also has quite serious ramifications. While most discussion of media bias focuses on elite outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, stories put out by The Associated Press form the backbone of national political coverage in the small- and medium-sized newspapers whose combined circulations far exceed the majors. These early campaign reports, moreover, set the larger story line that constrains later coverage of events. Once Al Gore got the “liar” label on the 2000 campaign trail, he was unable to shake it no matter how unfair the charges were or how much worse Bush’s behavior was. This is a movie we’ve all seen before, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
And now her photoshoped mug has become a prop on the most popular show on TV. It’s fitting that the audience, producers, network, hosts, and contestants seem to be unaware that the sign that drew so much attention was a case of mistaken identity, since American Idol‘s Pickler is dumber than a bag of hammers, but the original pickle sign was a humorous way to protest the media’s continual double-standard towards liberals. It would be nice for this to be used to shine a light on the talking points-recycling Pickler and her Republican-boosting colleagues. but since Idol is on Fox, don’t hold your breath waiting for Ryan Seacrest to point out the mix-up.
UPDATE : In case you thought I was mistaken, here’s a screengrab from the American Idol segment that features the Pickler :
Yesterday on CNN, Ed Henry gave the following update on the Feingold censure resolution :
What just happened a few minutes ago is that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the reason why there was an objection, is Frist declared he wants to bring this up for an immediate vote tonight, so it will not be a free pass. He wants to get Democrats on record here, make them decide whether they want to take what could be seen as an extreme stand and vote for a censure of President Bush.
Frist is gambling that in fact this will go down something like 85-to-15 or 90-10 because a lot of Democrats are probably saying they will not support this.
Assuming only ten Democrats end up supporting the censure resolution, where does that leave us? Well, take a look at these internals from the latest CBS poll (via Atrios) :
Andrew Sullivan’s attempt to defend himself for his support of George Bush is infuriating. Like so much of what he writes, the lesson is that if Andy does something, it’s because he’s carefully considered both sides of an argument and made a reasonable, informed decision. When liberals come to the exact same conclusions, it’s because they’re petty, ignorant, hyper-partisan and motivated by nothing other than a blind hatred for all things Bush :
[Krugman] has one decent point: yes, I lionized George W. Bush for a while after 9/11, and, in retrospect, my attempt to place trust in him at a time of national peril was a misjudgment. But then, in times of peril, some of us feel that supporting the president, whoever he is, and hoping he gets things right, are not contemptible impulses. I should have been more skeptical. In less dire circumstances, I might have been. But some of us, in the days after 9/11, did not immediately go into partisan mode, put aside some of our other objections (like the fiscal mess and the anti-gay policies), and rallied behind a president at war.
Andy, do us all a favor and cut the bullshit about “some of us…did not immediately go into partisan mode”. I don’t know anyone who didn’t to give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt after 9/11. Anyone. Even those I knew who hated Bush with a passion were willing to give the illiterate goob a second chance. Everyone I know was hit with the same soul-crushing despair on 9/11 and was desperate for a leader to unite behind.
But remember back to those confusing days after the attacks, you may recall that George W. Bush wasn’t anywhere to be found. So all the goodwill was going to the guy who stepped up and did his job for him, Rudy Giuliani. Hell, Bush wasn’t even the first President to step up to the plate :
Over now familiar refrains of “that’s unreal,” and “I can’t believe it,” and pregnant moans of “wow,” a spectacle of a different kind captured unblinking New Yorkers yesterday afternoon. Out of Manhattan’s Union Square came a welcome and commanding sight: former President Bill Clinton, surrounded by a growing mass of people.
. . .
“We need to just bolster people’s spirits right now, and support the president and the government,” he said between handshakes. “They’re going to need some time with this.”Clinton, who was in Australia when New York and Washington, D.C., were attacked, said he had spent the previous 24 hours flying to New York on an Air Force plane. He was kept informed of developments by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
. . .
Many said Clinton’s short appearance both magnified and made up for what they called President George W. Bush’s shortcomings during this crisis. The White House announced that the president would visit New York, for the first time, today.“So far he has not been a comforting presence,” said Emily Vacchiano, 26, who lives in SoHo. “He has not conveyed compassion or strength. Just the sight of him [Clinton] cheered everyone up today.”
But even with this leadership void and the President leaving all the heavy lifting of comforting a shell-shocked nation to Rudy and Bill, all of the lefties I knew were willing to heed Clinton’s advice and give the Administration some time. Even with the President giving the best speech of his life a week later, actions speak louder than words.
And that’s where most of us got off the bus. Andy may be proud to pat himself on the back for putting aside his objections to “the fiscal mess and the anti-gay policies”, but where was the sense of bipartisanship and sacrifice in the President’s actions after 9/11? I’m all about compromise, but the President’s agenda didn’t change one iota after the attacks on New York and Washington D.C.
To use the examples cited, Bush was [s]elected ten months earlier against the backdrop of a booming economy with the promise to cut taxes and give Americans “their” money back. With the attacks sure to have a heavy economic toll, the centerpiece of Bush’s agenda suddenly became a one-size-fits-all solution that would reinvigorate the economy. Booming economy? Tax cuts. On the eve of a recession? Tax cuts. With a few million $300 checks in the mail, a lot of us were left asking “Are you sure you don’t need that money to, say, go after Osama bin Laden?”. Doesn’t wartime require a sacrifice of some sort?
The “anti-gay policies” was an even bigger indicator that 9/11 didn’t anything about the President’s plans for the country. In post-attack America, that was unified and bracing for war, the President could have easily issued an executive order overturning the absurd “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with a statement like “anyone willing to die for his or her country has earned the right to defend the nation without being judged”. As a result of the result of the President being perpetually stuck in “partisan mode”, we’ve seen hundreds of people discharged since 9/11 (including at least 7 Arabic translators).
So spare me this crap about liberals being overly partisan following 9/11. The President got everything he wanted after the attacks (the PATRIOT Act being the best example), but once it was clear that the spirit of bipartisanship and compromise was only going to be one-sided, Americans of all stripes started to realize that the President couldn’t be taken at his word. With an event as jarring as what we experienced, a lot of us were hoping the catchphrase “9/11 changed everything” would be…well..true. But it wasn’t. The only thing 9/11 changed was the justifications for the actions the President already wanted to take.