Offensive Coordinator

I want to bless every single word of this Jamison Foser post, looking at the timeline of when David Gregory was insistently asking David Axelrod questions about "the White House coordinat(ing) with" Nico Pitney about his question from an Iranian at a press conference, and at the same time telling Mark Sanford's staff that "[C]oming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to...and then move on." Somehow that's NOT coordinating.

So, Gregory was not only coordinating with Sanford's staff about what topics Gregory would ask Sanford about, should the South Carolina Governor agree to appear on Meet the Press -- he was telling the aide he would allow Sanford to "frame the conversation how you really want to."

And then, just a few days later, Gregory took to the air to denounce the White House and Nico Pitney for coordinating about the subject of a question. Incredible.

The difference, of course, is that Gregory thinks he has a "press" card in his little hat, while Nico Pitney is just one of the unwashed dirty masses.

But Can You Actually Shake The Workers Upside-Down And Collect The Change From Their Pockets?

David Gregory, himself a union member but with the perspective of a Beltway Villager, had the new GM CEO on yesterday and couldn't stop asking him about union-busting:

GREGORY:…The legacy costs, meaning all of the costs associated with union employees, part of the United Auto Workers, is just a huge issue for General Motors. The government report indicates that in order to pay those retired autoworkers, gm has to produce an extra 900,000 cars every year. What is the message to the union now? Doesn’t it have to be those days are over?

HENDERSON: I think the message to all the constituents that play a part in our future we need to pull together. We need to sacrifice as a group, whether it's our people, our unions, our salaried employees, our dealers or suppliers, we need to pull together to do what's necessary to make General Motors viable going forward. We have been doing that. We’ve gotten enormous support from that up to this point. We need to do more.

GREGORY: Well, let's talk about how you can do more. How many union jobs are there in a typical factory for General Motors that have nothing to do with producing automobiles?

HENDERSON: Well, actually every job we have in the factory has something to do with producing an automobile. Whether it's obviously putting the actual car together or supplying materials to the line or maintaining the equipment that’s in the plant. So we have worked very hard and if you look at external surveys, for example, like a Harbor Report, we have closed the gap in terms of competiveness, in terms of the manpower. We have within our operation. We need to do more. Every person in the plant has something to do with putting together a car or truck.

GREGORY: But in some factories, you have a shop steward who's responsible for appointing--whether it's a civil rights chief or an education person, these are all union jobs that don’t have anything to do with producing the cars.

HENDERSON: Well, we have -- the union has key jobs, as you identified, but let's take an example. Let’s take health and safety-- we work together with the union health and safety in our plants. We have the safest plants in the United States, in fact, around the globe. And I think providing, for example, a safe work place is very much in the best interests of the company as well as the union.

GREGORY: You have told health care managers and executives over 65 they no longer get health care benefits. They have to revert at that point to Medicare. Is it time for union workers to accept that same limit?

HENDERSON: David, the provision of health care to our hourly employees will basically vest to the responsibility of a Viva trust, effective January 1st, 2010. The Viva Trust will be responsible for determining the level of benefits. I can't really forecast, if you will, what decisions they're going to make.

GREGORY: Do you think that's the kind of cut that the union should have to accept?

HENDERSON: Not for me to say, David. I think in the end, the trustees in the Viva are going to have to make those decisions.

GREGORY: Do you really expect this president, given how strongly supported he is by the unions, do you really expect him to take a step that would hurt the unions?

HENDERSON: I think President Obama -- let me put it in a positive -- basically said we want to work together to make sure this company is viable, successful and part of the automotive industry in the next 100 years. And basically, he asked all the parties to come back together and make sure we do exactly that. So I don't think it's about hurting some constituency or another. It’s about what do we have to do to win in the future.

Gosh, you'd think that GM was simply a make-work company to hire those lazy money-grubbing union employees. You wouldn't think that the problem of GM being among the only car companies in the entire world to have to pay for the health care of their employees exists at all. GM signed the union contracts, after all, and when AIG signs them they are sacrosanct and cannot possibly be abrogated. But GM, and companies like it, could have advocated for universal health care a half-dozen times over the past 60 years since WWII. The same with David Gregory. But it's much simpler, and acceptable to their upper-class sphere of influence, to bash unions.

If It's Sunday, It's John McCain

John McCain appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday, and while the content was unremarkable, a little portion at the end was pretty revealing.

DAVID GREGORY: This is your 54th appearance on Meet the Press. Now I know you're a competitive guy. Bob Dole still holds the record at 63. And so we've been doing the calculations here. We think we can make this up, maybe within a year's time. If you're game for that.

JOHN MCCAIN: I'd love to try. Thank you, David.

DAVID GREGORY: Sen. McCain, thank you very much for being here.

David Gregory was making a joke. And yet there's still much to this that's remarkable. John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press - just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows - 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.

And while this was McCain's inaugural appearance on Meet The Press this year, he has done Face the Nation in 2009, Fox News Sunday on two occasions, and sat down with John King of CNN as well, not to mention the celebrated Twitter-view with George Stephanopoulos. That's 5 appearances and counting and we're only at the end of March. McCain is actually crushing the once-a-month appearance schedule that Gregory jokingly set out for him.

I should mention at this point that McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election.

Sunday Morning Shows: Making It OK To Sleep In Since the 1950s

HuffPo sez that David Gregory will take over as the host of "Meet The Press." There are only about six people who actually care about this, so let me address them: Gregory is a sycophant who epitomizes Village "wisdom," and the show will be a crashing bore with the same old parade of bobblehead media stars getting the same old questions. NBC could have made a splash here and chose Rachel Maddow, but they fell back on the old CW.

Enthusiastic Puppets

I didn't pay a ton of attention to Scott McClellan's scathing new book because it's not like he has an image worth rehabilitating, and I figure he's already sold enough books based on the hubbub. And anyway, there isn't a lot that's new there. As the Bush Reelect eCampaign Director Mike Turk said in his Twitter feed:

Feeling for Scott McLellan. Nice getting savaged for saying what everyone knows to be true anyway.

The midlevel operatives have all come to this conclusion about Bush, just like 80% of the country. Lying us into war, running the country like it were a campaign, deception in the CIA leak case - this isn't groundbreaking stuff.

But two things about the book are revealing. Well, actually, two things about the reaction.

First is that, as I expected, conservatives are throwing the mother of all hissy fits in response to this. The wingnut blogosphere is blaming the messenger as they always do, attacking McClellan as a liberal, a liar, a charlatan trying to sell books, and claiming they never liked him anyway, a point TBogg does away with in minutes by finding the posts from the day of his departure as Press Secretary.

Power Line today:

"When Scott McClellan was the president's press secretary, I usually winced when I heard him speak. The wincing finally ended when Tony Snow replaced McClellan.

Now, with the publication of his new book, we get the chance to wince once more. It's an opportunity I intend to pass up."

You know what is coming...

Power Line then:

"Scott McClellan resigned as White House press secretary this morning. I think McClellan has done a capable job, and it's probably wishful thinking to imagine that the President would appoint someone who would take a more combative attitude toward the White House press corps. To be fair, McClellan has sometimes pushed back. But I think there is a lot of room to take a more aggressive approach."

The White House is perhaps even more spittle-flecked than the bloggers, calling McClellan "disgruntled" and even a traitor.

But I don't think this would be getting the kind of attention it has if McClellan didn't include some choice words for the media. Note to self - that's the way to get a book on the best-seller list:

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the "liberal media" didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

Now he's pointed the finger at the almighty PRESS. He's accused them of not living up to their responsibilities. So the press, naturally, had to push back. One way is to line up a cavalcade of Bush supporters to trash McClellan and damage his credibility. But because they're sensitive about their conduct during the war, among the most shameful in history, they had to defend themselves from these charges. It was quite remarkable:

Yesterday was actually quite an extraordinary day in our political culture because Scott McClellan's revelations forced the establishment media to defend themselves against long-standing accusations of their corruption and annexation by the government -- criticisms which, until yesterday, they literally just ignored, blacked-out, and suppressed. Bizarrely enough, it took a "tell-all" Washington book from Scott McClellan, of all people, to force these issues out into the open, and he seems -- unwittingly or otherwise -- to have opened a huge flood gate that has long been held tightly shut.

Network executives obviously know that these revelations are quite threatening to their brand. Yesterday, they wheeled out their full stable of multi-millionaire corporate stars who play the role of authoritative journalists on the TV to join with their White House allies in mocking and deriding McClellan's claims. One media star after the next -- Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams, Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer -- materialized in sync to insist that nothing could be more absurd than the suggestion that they are "deferential, complicit enablers" in government propaganda.

David Gregory was particularly amusing in defending the White House press corps, even though his own questions are in the public record, questions like "should we capture Saddam or just kill him?" The press was completely cowed by the Bush Administration, willing to reprint their propaganda and unwilling to challenge the most basic assumptions about the cause for war. This is in part because a lot of media figures are incredibly stupid and can't even judge praise from insult:

Potomac, MD: McClellan needs to get over himself. The nerve of blaming the media for their failures in the run-up to the War. Elisabeth Bumiller so eloquently explained how things work the night before the Iraq War started, 4,000 dead American soldiers ago: "it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.".

Anne E. Kornblut: That's a good point. (I'm a huge Bumiller fan).....

But the other part of this is much more insidious. There were massive amounts of corporate pressure to grease the skids for war with Iraq. Contrary opinions were not allowed on television, or if allowed were countered by multiple pro-war views. The corporate bosses wanted to capitalize on what they viewed as a patriotic fervor in the nation by hyping war. This is well-known. Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC as a result of his antiwar stance despite being the most popular show on the network. And Ashleigh Banfield spoke out about this censorship in public shortly after the war began, and was instantly consigned to the scrap heap of history.

And everyone else knew their place. But yesterday, discussing the book, Jessica Yellin went off the reservation and told the truth about the media conduct during the war - and the corporate pressure.

Cooper: Jessica, McClellan took the press to task for upholding their reputation. He writes “the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington. The choice of whether to go to war in Iraq…the ‘liberal’ media didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.” Dan Bartlett, former Bush advisor, called the allegation “total crap.” What’s your take? Did the press corps drop the ball?

Yellin: I think the press corps dropped the ball in the beginning when the lead up to war began, uh the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings and my own experience at the White House was that the higher the President’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives, and I was not at this network at the time, but the more pressure I had from these executives to put on positive stories about the President. I think over time….

Cooper: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the President?

Yellin: Not in that exact…they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes. That was my experience.

I hold very few hopes for Yellin's future at CNN. Bravo to her for telling the truth.

I'm sure that this is a one-day story, and the press will consider the matter concluded, in their favor, and move on. But people know this in their bones. The coverage did nothing to enlighten and only to heighten the frenzy over invasion. This was William Randolph Hearst getting his Spanish-American War all over again, and these blowhards can't come to terms with it because their whole world would come crashing down. They were puppets, enthusiastic puppets for an imperialist agenda. And they have to live with that forever.