CNN calls Obama elitist

I just do not know where to start on this one. I once again had the profound misfortune of watching CNN while at the gym. And once again, I came away with anger.

So, here's the deal. Yesterday, at San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said the following:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Daily Kos has the summary of the back and forth between campaigns here. Personally, I don't believe the comments are that big a deal, maybe just a little accidental slippage of the truth. But that's not even what I care about here. CNN, and Kitty Pilgrim in particular, very Seriously, and responsibly, charged into the fray to make sure we understand "Senator Obama's political attack on small-town America". She wanted to make sure we knew about the "outrage" at the "stunning comments". CNN wanted to make sure we judged for ourselves the last to last night's poll: "Do you believe that Senator Barack Obama's comments reveal his elitist attitude toward every hard working American?" Just like Fox News, that poll question is exceedingly fair and balanced, isn't it?

At points during the program, Pilgrim asks several correspondents for reactions, and they seem to be trying to offer the idea that it's not nearly as condemning a moment as she wanted.

PILGRIM: Words are being parsed very, very carefully. This is quite a statement. Errol, your thoughts on this?

ERROL LOUIS, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS": I think this is a problem Barack Obama should have anticipated and could have easily avoided which is he's walking on a tight rope every time he goes and speaks. Every place I've seen him campaign, in every state, he does something that politicians don't usually do, which is to ask people to be better than they are.

And to sort of delve into it and to say for this nation to work we all have to be better, we have to be more understanding, we have to be more generous, we have to be a little less narrow minded. It's very different from what politicians normally do.

And Roland Martin:

Wow. Politically dumb because he actually told the truth. At some point we have to accept the reality that there are people in America now who are angry and are bitter. And we do blame other folks for certain things.

Basically, Kitty Pilgrim and her producers were trying to shove the storyline that this was a huge gaffe down the throats of their correspondents and viewers, with phrses like the "very important controversy". Instead, you see them call her out. Here's another exchange: Pilgrim says she'll put the remark up, but then she puts Obama's response statement, and Clinton's remarks, never actually showing what Obama said. After:

PILGRIM: What strikes me about that remark, Roland, is that Senator Clinton is using this as an occasion to talk about being presidential. Did Senator Obama do himself a disservice in this remark in not coming up with a solution in siding with the problem instead of the solution?

MARTIN: Well, first of all, we don't have -- do we have the full tape of what he said after that, as well? Or do we just have that?

Even Roland Martin on the show was trying to get her to be a little fairer, just in case, maybe the remarks are being distorted a bit. The good news is that while Pilgrim was stuffing the anti-Obama spin down our throats, CNN correspondents fought back on both her show and on the Situation Room, surprisingly enough.

I hate CNN, but maybe, just maybe, there's a small chance it won't be too bad this time despite the MSM trying it damnedest.

UPDATE: It gets so much better. I honestly can't remember the last thing Hillary attacked on that she didn't also do or that Bill didn't do in his 1992 campaign. It's hilarious.

Bill can also lie to be a loyal husband.

I thought he was supposed to be a master politician. The polls were just starting to turn back slightly in Hillary's favor, implying that the damage from Tusla was starting to wear off. So why, Bill, do you bring it up again? And that you manage to lie 4 times in about a minute doing so is not only poor ethics, but poor strategy at this point, no?

UPDATE: Whoops, 8 times total.

What our Media is and isn't reporting

I haven't been doing this very long, and I'm already tired of writing about how terrible the media is. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy today. Either way, I'll just pass on two links that illustrate fun new media complaints. They really are dangerous.

Greenwald:

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

That's the statement in its entirety, and it's hard to imagine how it could be any clearer...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

Either way, isn't it rather self-evidently a huge story?

That's was the media is not reporting on, and here's what it is (from Digby):

Mitchell interviews Ann Kornbluth, a WaPo reporter who recently wrote a story about the anecdotes Clinton tells on the campaign trail which apparently got the attention of a hospital in Ohio. The hospital then decided to go on the record denying the veracity of this woman's story...Mitchell and Kornbluth both agree, however, that it doesn't matter whether the story is true or false (or that there are millions of similar examples of people dying for lack of insurance and proper health care.) None of that is relevant:

Mitchell: The Clinton campaign finds itself in another credibility gap, this time over a heart tugging health care story. Senator Clinton has been telling this story for weeks now out on the campaign:

Video:
Clinton: The doctors and the nurses tried hard, but they weren't able to save her baby. For fifteen days doctors and nurses worked heroically. But she died.

It is so wrong in such a good great and rich country that a young woman and her baby would die because she didn't have health insurance or a hundred dollars to get examined.

Mitchell: Well, it turns out it's not true. After reading about the story in the Washington Post, hospital officials demanded that the Clinton campaign stop using that anecdote. They say there is no indication that this woman was denied medical care, that in fact, she did have insurance.

...

Kornbluth: Well, this deputy sheriff, Brian Holman, met with her during a regular campaign stop. She had Chelsea with her and Ted Strickland the governor. He told this story, it was almost exactly as she repeated it, in the clip that you played. Uhm and she went on and started using it on the stump. And you know we all sort of hear these stories, and she doesn't use any names, so it's difficult to check it out but, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about stuff she says in her speeches and started to write about this woman...the central question is, should the campaign be vetting things before Senator Clinton says them on the campaign trail, especially given her recent problems with the story from Bosnia.

Mitchell: And that is the problem isn't it? That this contributes to a perception, fair or not fair, that she's got a problem telling stories that are accurate. Not to put too fine a point on it, it does damage her credibility.

Kornbluth: And we've seen this movie before. When Al Gore, the first time he was quote unquote caught saying something that wasn't entirely accurate, again, fair or unfair, it became a storyline. After that, going forward, he was under extreme scrutiny for that.The same thing happened with John Kerry, when he was seen as being for something before he was against it, constantly looked for flip-flopping in his stories.

So I think Senator Clinton has discovered that there is something out there that she has to be really careful about and it's the facts of the stories that she tells, whether that's fair or not.

Notice the passive voice: "whether that's fair or not." The press apparently have nothing to do with determining whether it is fair, setting the record straight or getting the facts. It's all about "perception" --- perception that is directly caused by lies they publish, spin they present as truth and "storylines" they create.

...

You may hate Clinton with everything in your being, and that's fine. But this kind of journalism is what's killing our political system and what gets people like John McCain and George W. Bush elected. Clinton was repeating a story about bad health care which she heard on the campaign trail from an American citizen. She wasn't tooting her own horn or putting down her opponent in the telling of it. She was illustrating the plight of the uninsured in this country, which even if it turns out to not be specifically correct in the details, is certainly not something that doesn't happen every day to somebody in this country.

In fact, I suspect this particular "gotcha" is being done to degrade the argument against universal health care as much as to embarrass Senator Clinton. The Clinton Rules state that if any part of a story is proven true, the entire story is true. The corollary is that if any part of a story about a Republican is proved to be false then the entire story is false. The same concept is at work with health care here. If any detail about bad health care in the US can be shown as false, then notions that our health care system is screwed up are also false. Get ready for more of this. I don't know if it will work, but if they can get the media to play it like this, then the subliminal subtext going out there is that Democrats are lying about health care. They don't have to convince everybody, just a few.

Ladies and Gents, our Fourth Estate.

Clinton skipped right over "too far" and has now switched sides.

There's so much here to hate. But this is no longer about which candidate you prefer. This is about the fact that she has completely switched sides:

Drudge. Limbaugh. The American Spectator. Richard Mellon Scaife. What exactly is it going to take before Clinton campaign staffers recognize that they are, in essence, now working for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

What the hell is this? You can position her absurd arguments for the delegates as desperation - even trying to convince superdelegates to vote based on the big states popular vote electoral college or telling us the pledged delegates should be fair game. I might even be tempted to excuse her big donors' extortion attempts and vote-buying attempts, since they were just her donors, not her campaign. But this is really just too far. She's switched parties. She's even taken to calling Obama a "liberal" as if it were a dirty word. This is absolutely absurd - it no longer matters if you favor her policies. If you're a Democrat, how can you be ok with these tactics and associations? She's really no longer running as a Democrat at all!

Oh, and in today's column, Nicholas Kristof hits on something I've been thinking for a few days. Clinton, may in the end, be remembered with the same fondness as Nader. Nader did lots of great things for this country before delivering Bush. No reputation is safe from this kind of backlash.

Man, I miss the days when she was just trying to cheat by seating MI and FL after the fact. They seem like so long ago.

UPDATE: I should point out that the extortion of Pelosi does have other, disastrous effects, so it's not as easily shrugged off as I suggest. However, I seriously doubt they would follow through on that, so I can ignore it as a bluff for now.

Resumé embellishment is so last election cycle.

This is really the year of the YouTube campaign. Key insight:

What makes this a YouTube campaign moment isn't that someone caught Hillary Clinton in an unguarded or reckless moment and posted the video on YouTube for all to see. No, what makes this a YouTube campaign moment is that the video from 12 years ago has ended up on YouTube to show that Clinton is completely wrong in almost every one of her assertions about that visit to Tuzla.

Maybe we'd move into New Politics even without Barack Obama. Maybe it was the times and political environment that demanded a new kind of politican. Transparency, thy name is YouTube.

CNN Fun!

CNN Fun:

Sen. Hillary Clinton said she "misspoke" last week when she gave a dramatic description of her arrival in Bosnia 12 years ago, recounting a landing under sniper fire.

and

Clinton has mentioned the sniper fire at least twice earlier in the campaign, including in December in Dubuque, Iowa, before the caucuses in that state.

The word "lie" or any variant thereof, is never mentioned in the article, yet "misspoke" is prominently featured in the headline. I suppose this isn't CNN's fault, but just the attitude of the MSM. However, if anyone still thinks Obama is getting unfair treatment in the media, here's another instance of the other way around. And 25 more... A summary from that post:

Even when Obama's coverage is more positive than Hillary's it can still be biased against him. If Obama earns an A, the media give him a B -. If Hillary earns a D, the media give her a C+. No matter what McCain does, he gets an A++++.

But the media goes and says, "Gee, we gave Obama a B- and we gave Hillary a C+, let's now wring our hands about how awful we are to Hillary." But grading on a curve, or false equivalency, or "even-steven-itis" is profoundly biased against a candidate like Obama who has been beating tremendous odds and run a nearly flawless campaign. Even if Obama sometimes gets better coverage than Hillary does, his coverage is consistently more negative than his actual performance and Hillary and McCain's are consistently more positive than their actual performances.

Mostly, I'm just really really tired of the media blithely repeating the Clinton talking points, especially the one about him getting unfair coverage. Maybe with the Wright thing, they'll stop saying it, but I am still not hearing calls for her tax returns from anyone in the MSM.

Obama's passport file and the Surveillance State

Since January, Barack Obama's passport file has been illegally accessed at least three times by employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, each time triggering an automatic investigation that can easily be leaked and turned into a media story. In fact, this is exactly what happened in 1992 with Bill Clinton. If this is a political move and not just employees' foolish curiously - given the administration's extreme disrespect for the law, I don't doubt it for a second - this is incredibly disgusting. But it's just the latest trend and not at all out of line with what we've seen from King George's Surveillance State.

...incidents like the snooping into Obama's passport file are not the exception, and are not even merely the rule, but are the pervasive and inevitable outcome of allowing government officials to spy on Americans without real oversight.

Yeah...

UPDATE: What on Earth is going on here? Does anybody actually believe it was harmless curiosity when it happened to both campaigns?

UPDATE 2: Make it a trifecta. Am I being too cynical to think they did it to McCain too to remove suspicion that it was political? I'm sure they would have known that the time this happened in 1992 would be uncovered, and that it'd be spun oppositely now, right? Wow, I sometimes amaze myself at how readily I can accept certain conspiracy theories with regard to this administration. But at this point, they've almost all turned out true, and just when you think it can't get worse, it turns out their imaginations are better than yours.

Olbermann's Influence

This sounds about right, and it's great. Olbermann will mobilize progressives. However, I still worry that the Clintonite progressives, such as they are, are too poisoned to realize that this kind of campaign cannot be tolerated.

Pelosi's even started saying what we've been wanting to hear. Maybe between the two, Clinton will get the message. Now that's probably my own false hopes.

Also, this is pretty disgusting.

Ok, here we go again..

Welcome to my new attempt at consistent blogging. I made one attempt a little while back, and it failed miserably after two posts. It's called "A Hitchhiker's Travels", and I will revive it beginning when I, well, travel, for more personal blog type stuff.

But I've been inspired to create another separate blog because, as most of you probably know since you are getting the link from my gchat status, I've been essentially using that as a political blog for a year now. But here, I can actually write longer comments and give full quotes from links and stuff! It's great. Also, I figure if, as I do on some particularly angry days, I need to post a whole bunch of links, well then I can do that too! Isn't blogging great?

This won't just be political, either, but really just anything I see or think that I think either people should or would like to know. Or really anything I feel like shouting out to whoever will listen. Hopefully you enjoy. And please comment and lemme know if I sound insane, paranoid, or too doomsday-like. Though I'll admit, for now, I will likely sound very much like that.

An example from The New Republic's Jonathan Chait:

[Clinton] needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton's decision to continue her campaign. It's actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he's unelectable. It's not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

When are the party leaders gonna step in and say "That's enough?" She's gotta be running either to tear him down or for a chance at 2012, by making sure McCain wins now. How can the remaining neutral party leaders (Gore, Dean, Edwards, Richardson, etc.) let her very obviously tear down the party's chances? Wasn't the point of them remaining neutral so that they would have the moral authority to stop this?

And one point about the new MI and FL primaries: I understand the need to seat the delegates in order to not discourage the voters in those states, but then there's the, you know, rules. But from a strategy point of view, even if Obama is saying that he'd accept a re-do for that reason, how can he, knowing that Clinton will just campaign by saying that she wanted to seat those delegates and he did not? Any changing of the rules in the middle will be a bad thing for Obama's campaign, except as a good-will gesture to the superdelegates. He has to basically believe that good will will counter the "momentum" PR that he will lose from these new primaries, or he has to believe, as many are beginning to, that he has already won. I just don't know that it's a good tradeoff.