A Little Slice Of Turkey

I don't want war! All I want is peace...peace...peace...!
A little piece of Poland,
A little piece of France,
A little piece of Austria
And Hungary, perchance!
A little slice of Turkey
And all that that entails,
And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!"

-Mel Brooks, To Be Or Not To Be

I guess the news peg for this is the anniversary of the start of WWII in September 1939, but Pat Buchanan has gone ahead and apologized for Hitler, claiming he sought no empire or wider war with Europe, and had merely benign interests of German unification at heart:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Matt Yglesias does quick work of the historical inaccuracies - Hitler invaded Russia as soon as he achieved a border with them by conquering Poland. And this is a decent riposte as well - Buchanan seems to expect a crazy person to also be a rational military strategist, and when he's not, searches for alternative explanation ("Hitler couldn't have wanted war because he didn't have enough planes! So it's Britain's fault!").

But I'll take the less dainty approach. In 1939, in a small town called Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan's revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum - why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don't you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn't live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

But the bigger point here to be made is that Pat Buchanan is paid by the allegedly liberal cable news network MSNBC, he has been on it for years, if you add up all his appearances throughout the day he probably spends as much time on the air as anyone outside of the Morning Joe crowd, and that's... OK. Calling Hitler misunderstood is not a firing offense at the liberal cable news network MSNBC.

Good to know.

My favorite comment in the Buchanan thread, by the way:

summarex
Great Article Pat.
But what’s your beef with general Pinochet?

Must be a follower of Milton Friedman.

Countdown To Telling The Truth

You've probably been following the very strange deal between Fox and GE to silence a feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann that threatened to sully the two corporate parents.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

Glenn Greenwald has been following this issue with the depth it deserves, noting it as part of the larger danger about corporate control of the media, and how certain subjects get denied coverage because it would bother those corporate benefactors. It's a serious issue.

Therefore, I was a bit dismayed by Olbermann's non-denial denial about any "deal":

On his show last night, Keith Olbermann essentially issued a non-denial denial about the GE-MSNBC-Fox story, saying that he himself was "party to no deal" - exactly what he said in the original New York Times article. There's no reason to doubt Olbermann - however, as journalism prof Dan Kennedy suggests (h/t Glenn Greenwald & Jay Rosen), Olbermann's own personal lack of involvement in a "deal" is far less important than the simple fact that GE started trying to give blatant news-content orders to MSNBC's newsroom - orders that may have been followed in places well beyond Olbermann's control.
Certainly, the fact that Olbermann resisted those orders is good news - but again, as I said in my original post, this story wasn't an indictment of Olbermann - it was an indictment of the entire corporate-news structure of the networks in question.

Indeed, in Olbermann's non-denial denial last night, he didn't refute the quotes from General Electric management, he didn't refute that MSNBC execs told its producers that they "wanted the channel's other programs [to] restrain from criticizing Fox directly," and he didn't refute this report from TV Newser saying that the parent companies for Fox and MSNBC have been in negotiations for months.

It was a weird segment last night, with Olbermann hitting O'Reilly on a ticky-tack maneuver, noting the coincidental timing of the George Tiller death as the reason he temporarily "retired" his O'Reilly character, and hitting Brian Stelter, the writer, without disagreeing with a word written in the piece.

It is very good that Olbermann has apparently stopped using Richard Wolff. But his dodgy statements last night about the provenance of any "deal" between GE and Fox leave me fairly cold. He claims that he was party to no deal and yet praises Greenwald's coverage of the story, which asserts that there, in fact, was a deal.

Olbermann has now made two contradictory statements about his role in the affair:

He confirms what Glenn Greenwald wrote, which is that he stopped covering O'Reilly because he was told to do so by his bosses at GE

He says that his decision to stop covering O'Reilly was purely a response to O'Reilly's role in the Tiller incident, and that any assertion to the contrary is a blackmail attempt by Roger Ailes

It is clear that there was a deal between GE and News Corp, because both are confirming it. So Olbermann is, at best, guilty of obfuscation by claiming that he was not "party" to any deal.

I'm mildly a fan of Olbermann, and his willingness to tell the truth about health care and the money drowning the process is significant and vital. But his cloying behavior in this episode thus far has damaged his reputation to an extent.

Why Can't We Have A Better Media?

MSNBC has a "beer summit" ticker running right now, and just broke into live coverage to capture President Obama's remarks on the upcoming beer summit. Obama is not obliging by actually talking about the economy, unemployment and housing figures.

I'm sure somebody in the MSNBC control room is thinking, "crap, he's talking about issues that matter to people and not the beer summit!"

Gingrich Concedes The Point; Will Others?

It's very interesting to me that Newt Gingrich dialed down his description of Sonia Sotomayor as a racist, even if, in context, he didn't. Surely we know how this works - we saw it last week with the President. Obama took one step back on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, conceding the point but also set it in context, but it set off a flurry from the commentariat, claiming that Obama "caved," etc. Now Gingrich does essentially the same thing, conceding the point but adding a whole bunch of context actually keeping his claim alive that Sotomayor is a racist. And while this gives Republicans space to welcome the return of civility to the debate, it keeps them on the defensive and in a reactive position as well. Clearly calling Sotomayor a racist wasn't exactly working out for them, so they had to defuse that. But the backpedaling is historically the kind of thing Republicans NEVER do. Could they be understanding the damaging nature of their rhetoric?

Of course, Gingrich isn't alone, and there are plenty of other ways for Democrats to continue to exploit this and put the pressure on. In fact, Gingrich's admission, despite its fatuousness, gives them more ammunition - "even Newt Gingrich disavowed this," etc. For example, will Republicans be made to answer for Pat Buchanan's comparison of Sotomayor to white supremacists? In the distant past, Buchanan was a symbol for a particular strain of xenophobic ugliness. Now he's a respected member of the media community and that "liberal" network MSNBC. Will he be held to account?

Given Pat Buchanan's history of clear bigotry - most recently demonstrated in his reminder last night that he supported and continues to defend a white supremacist - there really isn't any good reason for MSNBC to continue putting him on the air. The man is a bigot, plain and simple. In light of the hot water MSNBC has gotten into in the past for bigoted comments by its employees, you would think they would want to distance themselves from the likes Buchanan.

But what's really extraordinary is that MSNBC brings Buchanan on air to talk about race issues. It gives Pat Buchanan a platform from which to call other people racists. Granted, if there's someone who knows racists better than Pat Buchanan does, I can't think of who it would be. But his is not the kind of expertise MSNBC should be inflicting upon its viewers.

...by the way, this is completely divorced from the larger debate over Sotomayor's confirmation, which is assured. The "fight" is a bit of a shadow play for the base. But conceding the point doesn't help that cause.

...the Chairman of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, won't retract the racism charge. Wedge away, Democrats.

...This also brings up a larger question about that liberal network MSNBC. Giving space to an out-and-out bigot like Pat Buchanan, who's on that channel more often than the peacock, reflects really poorly on them. Not to mention the three hours of unadulterated horseshit in the morning.

The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.

This says more about their qualifications to discuss public policy and labor relations than it says about unions. To pick just one obvious example, UPS is unionized -- and the company made more than $3 billion last year. That's "billion" with a "b," and those are profits, not revenues.

Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

Oh, and GE owns NBC-Universal, which owns MSNBC, which pays Joe Scarborough a handsome salary (and the unionized workers who help get his show on the air considerably less.)

Scarborough, you recall, is the former GOP Congressman who represented Michael Griffin pro bono, the man who killed abortion provider Dr. David Gunn, in his murder case.

The Liberal MSNBC

Running uninterrupted a 30-minute mendacious speech from Michael Steele at an RNC meeting. Too many lies even to count.

Thinking hard to remember the long Howard Dean speech run on any network when he was DNC Chair.

...kind of worth it for this quote:



"This change is being delivered in a tea bag. And that's a wonderful thing."

Rigged Game

I sincerely hope that nobody is surprised by the fact that MSNBC, which has hyped the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer "battle royale" for over a week now, has coincidentally dropped coverage of it at precisely the moment when Stewart delivered the knockout punch and made minced meat out of Cramer, CNBC and the entire media-industrial complex:

TVNewser reports that “MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today.” By TVNewser’s count, Cramer’s Daily Show interview was only mentioned once on MSNBC today and that was during the White House press conference when a reporter asked for Obama’s reaction.

CNBC is part of a corporate entity (although, interestingly, they don't report to the news division. That corporate entity is not going to get rich by highlighting the deficiencies of certain parts of its business. Like I said earlier, it's not just CNBC. It's the entire media complex. And this indictment of their business won't be prosecuted and turned into a conviction.

James Rainey is also interesting today about CNBC and the larger implications.

Rachel's Gift

We're into week 2 of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and the ratings are strong. She continues to beat Larry King, both in the demo and overall; she's already getting three times the viewers of Glenn Beck; and she actually beat her lead-in Keith Olbermann on Tuesday night. Rachel is nowhere near Hannity & Colmes yet, but the show is only two weeks old.

I've been TiVo'ing it and watching, and I have to say that it's unlike anything else on cable news. Olbermann comes out of the cable tradition, and his internal rivalries with the likes of O'Reilly and Limbaugh set it in a certain shoutfest space (even though he never has on anybody who disagrees with him, which I think is actually a mistake). Maddow's show is completely different. It's relentlessly factual, engaging and while it has a point of view, it uses argument over bluster to make it. It's quite extraordinary, not only because she manages to expose someone like Tom Frank to the cable-watching world, but because it's a show that uses complete sentences and actually foregrounds facts. Not to mention that it shares Maddow's taste for the absurd, like the story yesterday about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars being rolled back to $100, for example.

It's a really impressive achievement so far.

Rigged

I hear a lot of people fretting about the latest USA Today/Gallup, and in particular they're saying that Obama is losing the messaging war and watching the election slip away. I think that Josh Marshall may be right that their messaging appears largely reactive (he's also right that messaging and the air war is far more visible than the ground game, where I think the Obama campaign has a serious advantage). But to the extent that he is right, he must also take into account how that narrative has been set by corporate-owned media.

Indeed Obama has run ads with their core messaging strategy of lashing McCain to Bush. They've released at least a half-dozen of them over the past two weeks. There was certainly an option for responsible media to notice this aggressive advertising strategy. They haven't. Instead, McCain "celebrity" ads and sneering attacks are given the top-line treatment. The Obama campaign ran with the "how many houses does McCain have" gaffe for a few days. They could and should keep doing so, but media allowed it to be overshadowed. In fact, they just banished a nominal liberal away from their political coverage after howls of attacks from Republicans, which still have the desired effect.

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, giant conglomerates which own major defense contractors are simply never going to be in the business of promoting liberalism. Olbermann is anti-Bush and mildly interested in protecting civil liberties but he's hardly echoing liberal positions on issues. Rachel Maddow's premiere tonight will be very interesting to watch, but that's of course one show.

What comes through here is a need to placate the right. And that absolutely seeps into coverage of the day-to-day of this Presidential campaign. McCain's people have worked the refs and the refs have responded. They conflate documented lies from Republicans with one statement that says McCain voted 95% of the time with Bush (true in 2007, and it was 100% in 2008 so they're being generous) when the lifetime score is 90%. This gives the impression that "everybody fibs" in political campaigns, which allows the GOP to continue lying because they're never called on it.

Back in 2000, the exit polls showed that among the 24 percent of the electorate who said it was very important to them to select an “honest and trustworthy” president, 80 percent voted for George W Bush. This, I assume, had something to do with the fact that the press repeatedly weaved through its coverage of Gore a narrative about Gore’s alleged difficulty telling the truth, even though most of the data points where Gore lied or “exaggerated” were actually made up by the press. McCain, by contrast, has not only been caught in several bald-faced lies, but in a few instances — this business with Palin and the bridge most notably — keeps on doing it in very high-profile contexts even though they’ve gotten called on it repeatedly. So where’s the narrative about how McCain’s key strategy introducing Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting lies at the heart of the presentation?

The extent to which Obama's campaign can change the messaging narrative is extremely limited and was always going to be extremely limited. The media is simply locked in to their preconceived notions of how Democrats and Republicans are viewed by them. They are uninterested in policy except where candidates, particularly the Democratic candidate, differ from ideological orthodoxy, but of course they never determine what that orthodoxy is, so all you end up hearing is a Democrat telling America what Republican plans they would adopt. They whine that the policy proposals are not fresh, but they are completely uninterested in hearing about them at all. They poll-watch and judge horse races and look at who's hitting who with what ad and who's fighting. And they already have written those scripts in triplicate.

If anyone has a clue how to beat this back, I'm all ears. I would say that ensuring that online media flourishes is paramount, and hoepfully less people will get their news from these "official" sources in the years to come.

...so HowardKurtz comes out and says that McCain's latest ad, claiming that Sarah Palin stopped the bridge to nowhere, is a lie. OK, but isn't it part of a pattern of lies? This is what the press did to Al Gore in 2000, and it's more warranted here. That would match the Obama campaign's comment:

"Despite being discredited over and over again by numerous news organizations, the McCain campaign continues to repeat the lie that Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere. John McCain has voted with George Bush 90% of the time and he and Sarah Palin will continue Bush's economic policies, his health care policy, his education policy, his energy policy, and his foreign policy. McCain and Palin will say or do anything to make people believe that they will change something besides the person sitting in the Oval Office. That's the kind of politics people are tired of, and it's anything but change."

Bread And Circus

MSNBC is running right now, LIVE, President Bush's meeting with the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

ESPN isn't even running this.

Anyone want to buy a television?

Quick Questions

How exactly does Dan Abrams, the general manager of MSNBC, get away with using the phrase "inside DC media" and keeping himself outside of it?

Also, how does he get away with running a "Beat the Press" segment where he criticizes media foolishness on every channel but the one he runs?

I'm somewhat sympathetic to his arguments on occasion, but how can the head of one of the few national cable networks in America pretend to be a figure outside the media?

...OK, so apparently (h/t bmaz), Abrams resigned from the position of general manager last October. Of course, MSNBC personalities were pushing the same sorts of narratives at that time, and you'd think Abrams, rather than criticizing the amorphous "DC media" about it, could have, I don't know, held a staff meeting.

I guess my larger point is that, when so many broadcasters who host their own shows take on that "independent, anti-establishment" persona, it kind of feels like when all those radio stations switched to "alternative music" circa 1994. Kind of destroys the definition.

Michigan/Debate Roundup

I'm away from the teevee, but what I'm gathering from initial reports is that Romney took Michigan by promising every laid-off autoworker in the state a free pony and their own AMC Pacer, and the folks at NBC News are a bunch of Page Six gossip columnists who are openly contemptuous of discussing issues and would rather try to cause rifts in the Democratic Party for their own ratings glory. The candidates aren't biting, and it sounds like the debate got into some real substantive territory, especially when Statler and Waldorf stopped asking the questions and the candidates picked it up.

Overall, a good night for Democrats.

(also 38% of Democrats in Michigan voted uncommitted today, which means that Clinton's delegate lead if the DNC decides to seat Michigan's delegates won't be as big a factor. And even if you're a Clinton fan, it'd be pretty weak to have her win the nomination based on an intra-party delegate fight in Michigan.

Right On David Friggin' Shuster

Today on MSNBC's "Super Tuesday" David Shuster single-handedly restored credibility to the University of Michigan during an interview with Sam Brownback. Brownback tried to refer to the Moustache of Understanding, Tom Friedman, in talking about Iraq, and Shuster delivered the first broadside at Friedman I've ever seen on national television:

Brownback: So what I'd like to see us do is to capture that military progress that's taking place into a political surge. This is Thomas Friedman's line, but send Jim Baker over to negotiate a deal on a three-state structure within Iraq...

Shuster: But Senator, with all due respect...

(crosstalk)

Shuster: Senator, with all due respect, Tom Friedman, who you cite there, has been saying "Well, the next 6 months are crucial," he's been saying that for the last year and a half...

Somewhere in the Times Building, somebody just threw a coffee cup into a window...

Tucker Carlson Luridly Describes Hate Crime

This is stunning. Tucker Carlson, he of the erstwhile bowtie, explains that when he was once cruised in a public bathroom, he responded by getting a friend and beating the fag up.

CARLSON: Let me -- let me put it this way. Whether he's gay or not actually is not our business, and I do think it's indefensible that the newspaper in Idaho spent a year interviewing 300 people to answer the question, Is he gay? That's none of your business. Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms. I think people who do -

SCARBOROUGH: Really?

CARLSON: Yeah, I have. You know what, Let me just say.

SCARBOROUGH: Wait, hold on a second. Dan, hold on a second. I don't mean to take over, but have you been bothered in public restrooms, Dan? Because I know I haven't.

CARLSON: I have. I've been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.

ABRAMS: Really?

CARLSON: Yes.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.

CARLSON: And let me just say, I think --

SCARBOROUGH: That's something.

CARLSON: -- people should knock that off. I'm not anti-gay in the slightest, but that's really common, and the gay rights groups ought to disavow that kind of crap because, you know, that actually does bother people who didn't ask for being bothered [...]

CARLSON: But it's also -- but it's evidence, in Larry Craig's case -- I mean, you know, you just watch the press conference, and you see a man who's not in possession of himself. I mean, there's something -- you know, I'm not a shrink, but there's clearly something wrong with Larry Craig. He appeared to believe it. This is a guy who's been accused repeatedly over the years of soliciting sex from men in bathrooms. So the chances that he's arrested for the same thing accidentally --

ABRAMS: Right, right, right.

CARLSON: What, he's the unluckiest man and he's Job?

SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Tucker?

CARLSON: You know what I mean? It's insane!

SCARBOROUGH: Was he the guy in Georgetown, Tucker?

CARLSON: No, actually. I got that -- my point is -- let me just say --

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and -- and --

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I'm the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet --

[laughter]

I guess the cops missed the hate crime part, just the terrible damage to Tucker's honor. Media Matters has the whole transcript. Is MSNBC going to do anything about one of their on-air personalities admitting to beating up a gay man?

I don't chastise Larry Craig because he's gay, it's because he's a hypocrite. And I question the legality of the arrest to begin with, given the circumstances. But what is unequivocal is that responding to solicitation by bashing the guy's skull against a door is a hate crime. Absolutely. What's the statute of limitations here? Can I make a citizen's arrest?

UPDATE: Digby makes a good point. How exactly did Carlson know he was being cruised?

Furthermore, if Carlson and his high school pal, whom he allegedly left the bathroom to find and then came back to assault this gay man, did this as a result of the guy "tapping his feet" on the floor and sliding his foot under the stall divider, as Larry Craig admitted to doing, then Tuckie knows a hell of a lot more about gay cruising signals that the average straight fellow. I asked my husband if he would have had a clue what it meant if someone did that and he didn't know what I was talking about.

When the "signals" are that obscure, only the people who are in on the code know what's going on. Everyone else just thinks it's some guy sliding his foot around weirdly and tapping his toes while he sits on the toilet and they don't respond. The guy moves on to someone who knows the code and responds that they are interested.

In other words, if Tucker is picking up these signals as a gay come on, then he's far more clued in to the gay world than any straight guy, except maybe a cop, would normally be. We don't know, of course, what really happened to Tucker that day when he was "bothered" in the men's room. Perhaps it was really aggressively sexual and traumatizing. But he didn't make any distinctions and made the case that he'd been a victim of someone like Craig, so Craig's behavior is all we really have to go on.

UPDATE II: Tucker defends himself by telling a completely different story:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

That's simply a totally different story. In this one, a man assaulted him and he seized him for the cops after getting help. In the first one, someone "bothered" him, he got a friend, and bashed his head against a door. Which is it?

No More Cosby Show

This was a LOOONNNGG time coming. Rita Cosby, symbol of the dark ages of MSNBC, takes her "bowels of hell" voice and goes home.

Since they already cancelled her show, they don't have to replace her with anyone. And really, how could you replace a force of nature like Cosby? Although missing white women everywhere did just shed a tear. Along with remote camera operators in Arbua.

Atta J. Turk posts so we never forget:



Olbermann-for-Cosby is a trade right up there with Frank Robinson-for-Milt Pappas.