THIS MODERN WORLD

Surprise, surprise. The “rebel” Republicans weren’t so rebellious after all. They’ve spent the last week or two grandstanding and insisting on their opposition to the President’s torture and mock trials, but when it came time to choose between their (supposed) principles and helping their party present a united front in an election year, they sold out. Of course the ever-compliant media will bless this compromise since St. McCain can do no wrong. Even when he’s acting like a partisan ass, he’s somehow a non-partisan maverick. As usual, Digby‘s got the right take on all this :

Can anyone in the know explain to me how letting McCain run with this torture debate benefitted the Democrats in any way?

Here’s how the optics look to me:

McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.

Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.

The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don’t have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.

Unless the Dems ready to threaten to filibuster a national security bill a month before an election — which I doubt — I expect that the Republicans are going to rush this through the conference and force through this piece of shit bill in a hurry, just like they forced the AUMF through in October 2002 and give the republicans a big honking “victory” in the GWOT.

The Dems are all going to be twisted into pretzels and look like they have no backbones as they struggle with a united GOP saying that McCain and Huckleberry Graham made sure “the program” is moral and necessary. Vote for it for for the terrorists. So they’ll end up voting for it without getting any benefit from it.

Digby’s not the only one ready to call this one a defeat for Democrats but it shouldn’t be too hard for them to regain control on this issue (provided that a couple of them grow a spine). A decent rebuttal would go something like this :

“Senators McCain and Graham may have sold out on this issue, but the Democratic party still believes that torture is torture, no matter what the President may choose to call it. We in the Democratic party aren’t willing to sacrifice our humanity in order to protect our way of life, because to do so would destroy the moral foundation upon which this great nation was founded. The inhuman treatment of suspects by this administration is deplorable and if Senator McCain is no longer opposed to torture, then we’ll have to continue this fight without him.”

Don’t let the conventional wisdom coalesce around the notion that rubber stamping the President’s bill is a compromise. The GOP “rebels” are cowards for buckling under the pressure of their President and their party. The only compromise was the one made when those Senators sold their souls.

Another excerpt from Jeff Cohen’s Cable News Confidential:

Ann Coulter & Me

by Jeff Cohen

As an MSNBC in-house pundit in 2002, I had a timeslot each afternoon for one-on-one debates with a roster of rightwingers, including GOP Members of Congress, Rev. Jerry Falwell, National Review editor Rich Lowry, and buckraker Armstrong Williams—who went on to pocket nearly a quarter-million dollars from the Bush administration to promote its “No Child Left Behind Act.” When I repeatedly debated Williams at MSNBC, I had no inkling about Team Bush’s No Pundit Left Behind program.

In June I was set to debate Ann Coulter, who was on tour promoting a book called Slander. Coulter was firmly established as the top shock jock of cable news. I knew from hanging out with too many conservative pundits in too many greenrooms that her TV stardom was the source of envy; they groused that she used her legs, miniskirts and sleek blond hair to gain unfair advantage over other right-wing yakkers. I heard this complaint mostly from men over 50.

I’m willing to believe Coulter when she publicly proclaims that she’s not anorexic or bulimic. But I did wonder if her unfair advantage was some sort of diet/pep pill. Not that drugs would excuse her of personal responsibility for muddle-brained comments—like referring to Tipper Gore as “gaudy white trash.” Or talking about “the benefits of local fascism.” Or calling for public flogging of juveniles, because it wouldn’t be cool “in the ’hood” to be flogged.

I wondered if she was sober in 1997 when, as an MSNBC contributor, she debated Vietnam veteran Bobby Muller about landmines. Discussing Vietnam, Muller said, “In 90 percent of cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up—Ann, are you listening?—they were our own mines.” At which point Coulter interrupted to say. “No wonder you guys lost.” She said that to a man who took a bullet in Vietnam, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.

I suspect that the happy-pill hypothesis persists because, as cable news viewers know all too well, Coulter is so often laughing inappropriately while spouting her odious commentary.

To me, Coulter is something of a cross between Joan Rivers and Eva Braun. Now I have a general rule against Eva Braun comparisons, ever since my pal Randy Credico, a comedian, got banned from the Tonight Show 20 years ago—after he quipped that whenever he saw America’s UN ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick on TV, he had to wonder “if Eva Braun really died in that bunker in 1945.” I’ve made an exception in Coulter’s case. (In Slander, she called Katie Couric “the affable Eva Braun of morning television.”)

I looked forward to my Coulter debate, which had been scheduled a week in advance. I read chunks of Slander (for which I deserved combat pay) and prepared questions. But I wasn’t sure whether the book was serious or self-parody. Its thesis is that liberals engage in name-calling because they can’t engage in logical, factual debate. This from an author who doesn’t limit her insults to Democrats like Hillary “Pond Scum” Clinton; she called the Republican EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman a “bird brain” and former GOP senator Jim Jeffords a “half-wit.” When the rightwing editors of National Review rejected a Coulter column urging enhanced airport vigilance against “suspicious-looking swarthy males,” she called the editors “girly-boys.”

On page 2 of her book, I learned that liberals have “a hatred of Christians”—and, a few pages later, that “liberals hate America” and “hate all religions except Islam.” On page 5, I read, “New York Times columnist Frank Rich demanded that [Attorney General] Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists.” This claim was sheer invention and offered almost a textbook example of slander, the apparently un-ironic title of her book.

With my questions ready, I got into makeup, put in my earpiece, and headed to the set as I did around that time each day. But just before airtime, my producer informed me, “She won’t debate you.”

I was incredulous: “This was set a long time ago. I’m ready to go.”

“She’s not,” replied the producer. “She claims she knew nothing about a debate.”

I was a network staffer ready to debate the contents of a book. The author was a guest, unwilling to debate. Which of us do you think went on the air? Ann Coulter, of course—appearing with an anchor ill-prepared to ask tough questions.

If MSNBC were following the codes of journalism, an author unwilling to debate her controversial book would not be given a free ride. But MSNBC follows the codes of conformity and show biz: Coulter is a draw, so she dictates the terms of debate . . . or nondebate.

So much for “The Liberal Media.”

This:

OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report’s findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

The report’s criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada’s own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

* * *

The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.

Greenwald has more:

So on top of operating secret torture gulags in Eastern Europe, we also kidnap people, charge them with no crime, given them no opportunity to defend themselves, send them off to be tortured for months, and then when it turns out that they are completely inncoent, we block them from obtaining compensation in our courts because our Government claims that national security would be jeopardized if they were held accountable for their behavior.

How can you be an American citizen and not be completely outraged, embarrassed, and disgusted by this conduct? What the Bush administration is doing on so many levels is a grotesque betrayal of every national value and principle we have claimed to embraced and fought for. Can it even be debated at this point that the Bush administration has so plainly, as Billmon described it the other day, “forfeit(ed) forever its ability to chastise the human rights abuses of others without triggering a global laughing fit”? Who would ever take seriously the notion that a Government that engages in this behavior can lecture anyone on human rights abuses or import democratic values around the world?

As I’ve made clear in previous posts, I think Nancy Grace is a loathsome troll whose show defiles the network upon which she appears. Even if this is the third post I’ve done on the subject this month, Dahlia Lithwick’s article “Graceless” is a must-read :

Grace is a former—very successful—prosecutor from Atlanta who has devoted herself to victims’ rights since she lost her college sweetheart to a violent mugging. Grace mixes the sweetness of a Southern debutante with the snarling tenacity of a mad dog, and she has carved out a niche for herself on Headline News and Court TV, as a legal expert/talk-show host/roving prosecutor. She knew Peterson was guilty long before the jury did, and even her mistakes (she knew Gary Condit did it, too) are readily forgotten.

Some of the criticisms Grace faces this week are fair, but many aren’t. Some go to larger problems about what passes for truth on television and the sick culture of O.J.-tainment that has been with us since the Salem witch trials and has exploded with Court TV. Yes, Melinda Duckett was treated like crap by Nancy. But Duckett, after all, freely chose to go on the show.
. . .
Another criticism of Grace is that she privileges sensationalism, raw emotionalism, and victims’ rights over the complexity of the legal process. She declines the journalist’s project of clarifying or explaining the law and aims for the entertainer’s use of the law as a vehicle for the war between good and evil. In her 2005 book, Objection, Grace dismisses “legalese, arguments for argument’s sake. … None of it matters. All that matters is the truth and it remains the same, no matter how attorneys twist it and turn it and repackage it.”

Grace’s conviction that there is a single, simple “truth” to every case, and that lawyers and legal processes work to confound rather than clarify it, is chilling in a lawyer. More troubling still, is her tingly spider-sense that she alone can discern that truth in the earliest days of the investigation. But worst of all is her belief that she has some singular role to play in bringing the criminal to justice.

To me, the “worst of all” can be summed up by this line further in the article :

Grace readily confesses that she isn’t a journalist.

Then what the hell is she doing with a show on the Cable News Network??

CNN, if you insist on giving a platform to people who add little more to public discourse than a sense of righteous rage, could you at least give us a way of setting our expectations accordingly? Which of your hosts should we expect to live up to a reasonable standard of journalistic ethics and which ones are just on the air to provide a shallow thrill? If it’s unfair of us to consider some of he people who appear on CNN as “journalists”, then which ones can we rely on to give us that “most trusted name in news” level of credibility and which ones are just loudmouths you hired to boost ratings?

If you want to ask your favorite CNN personality whether or not they’re considered “journalists”, CNN employee emails are firstname.lastname@turner.com (ex. Jayson.Blair@turner.com). Watch your language, be nice, and be sure to let me know if you hear anything back.

An excerpt from Jeff Cohen’s new book, Cable News Confidential (coincidentally the subject of our latest contest):

For two decades, I’ve been preoccupied with one issue above all others: that both ends of the political spectrum get their say in the media. One reason (among many) that I worked so hard to retire George W. Bush in 2004 was my nightmare that a defeated John Kerry would be hired by cable news to represent “the left” day after day on a TV debate show.

Fox News Channel often gets blamed for the standard format that pits forceful, articulate rightwingers against wimpy, halting liberals. Fox’s pairing of righty heartthrob Sean Hannity with back-pedaling, barely left-of-center Alan Colmes is a prime example of this lopsided format.

But it’s wrong to blame Fox for television’s center-right, GE-to-GM spectrum. That format was firmly in place years before there was a Fox News. The real culprits: CNN and PBS.

Take Crossfire, started by CNN in 1982 as the only nightly forum on national TV purporting to offer an ideological battle between co-hosts of left and right. Crossfire’s co-host “on the left” for the first seven years was a haplessly ineffectual centrist, Tom Braden, a guy who makes Alan Colmes look like an ultraleft firebrand.

In CNN’s eyes, Braden apparently earned his leftist credentials by having been a high-level CIA official—ironically enough, in charge of covert operations against the political left of Western Europe. Braden was paired on Crossfire with ultrarightist Pat Buchanan. During the Braden-Buchanan years, LSD guru Timothy Leary told a reporter that watching Crossfire was like watching “the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.” It may have been Leary’s most sober observation ever.

I guested several times on Crossfire with the tired 70-something as my alleged ally. Once as I took my seat on the set, seeing Braden totally caked up with makeup, my first impulse was to reach over to take a pulse. My second impulse: flee the studio.

In a 1988 Crossfire appearance, when I criticized the conservative tilt of TV punditry and debates restricted to right vs. center, Buchanan could mount only a feeble defense of Braden: “What do you think is sitting next to me? What do you think this is, a potted plant?”

“A healthy Ficus,” observed a Mother Jones writer, “would add more balance.”

The taboo against genuine progressives as hosts was even clearer when Crossfire needed substitutes “on the left” and CNN chose Beltway centrists like Jodie Powell (President Carter’s press secretary) and Morton Kondracke (yes, the guy now on Fox . . . and no, he was no more progressive then). These were men who would never declare themselves to be “on the left” in real life; they seemed to wince when CNN made them say it on television.

On both CNN and PBS, one of TV’s longest-running stand-ins for the left has been Mark Shields, even while his promo material denied any ideological leanings: “Mark Shields is free of any political tilt.” When John Roberts became our country’s chief justice, Shields wrote a scalding attack. . . not on the right-wing judge (whom he actually praised) but on a feminist leader who opposed Roberts. Shields is a smart, articulate guy—but he’s no more an advocate for the American Left than Mel Gibson is an advocate for reform Judaism.

Seeing liberals on TV back-pedal night after night in the face of the Buchanans and Hannitys helps create a public image of the American Left as weak, evasive, lacking in values—and the American Right as clear, firm and moral. Pundit TV has defined not only a skewed spectrum of debate but a road map for defeat of liberal politicians.

Imagine if the American Right had been represented year after year on TV not by the Buchanans and Hannitys, but by Republican pundits allied with Christine Todd Whitman and Arlen Spector—moderates dismissive of their party’s activists.

Now imagine that the American Left had been represented on TV not by the Bradens, Kinsleys and Colmeses, but by progressive pundits like Barbara Ehrenreich and Jim Hightower.

Neither scenario is easy to imagine—which says a lot about the real bias of TV news.

Jeff Cohen can be contacted via his website.