When The Press Corps Attacks

The White House Press Corps has had it. They're tired of the games, the evasions, the disrespect. They will boldly stand up for their profession and not hold back any more. Now the truth can be told. They will ask the penetrating, uncomfortable questions that no Press Secretary wants to hear.

They are going to finally call out the Administration for their lies in the run-up to Iraq!

No, scratch that, they're going to be pissy about Robert Gibbs walking in 20 minutes late to a briefing.

As the daily press briefing began this afternoon at 2:07pmET, several members of the White House press corps spoke up to press secretary Robert Gibbs about his tardiness.

FishbowlDC reports that the briefing began about 20 minutes after the two minute warning was given and that ABC's Jake Tapper "had taken charge with two visits to the Lower Press office to complain during the long wait."

By the time Gibbs arrived, members of the press corps could be heard complaining saying things like, "it irritates everybody here."

We hear the late briefings are a pattern, and that it was not an issue during the Bush administration.

On one level, reporters have deadlines, and this particular breed of reporters needs Gibbs to do their job. So fine. On another level, Gibbs was apparently late this time because he was talking to the President about an issue sure to come up in the briefing. Also, of all the things to finally blow their stack about, the press corps reaches their limit on punctuality? Lie to them, fine, just don't make them sit in an air-conditioned room for an extra five minutes. Show some respect for the office like George W. Bush did.

By the way, if Gibbs were prompt, maybe the press would have more time for scintillating, piercing questions like this.

MS. ROMANO: The teleprompter changed last night.

MR. GIBBS: Mm-hmm.

MS. ROMANO: What was that about that? It's a big jumbotron now.

MR. GIBBS: You know can I tell you this?

MS. ROMANO: Yes.

MR. GIBBS: I am absolutely amazed that anybody in America cares about who the President picks at a news conference or the mechanism by which he reads his prepared remarks. You know, I guess America is a wonderful country.

MS. ROMANO: You're saying this is all Washington Beltway stuff?

MR. GIBBS: I don't even know if it's that. I don't think I should implicate the many people that live in Washington.

MR. GIBBS: No, I you know, I don't think the President let me just say this: My historical research has demonstrated that the President is not the first to use prepared remarks nor the first to use a teleprompter.

I'm all for a vigorous press fighting for their rights to access, but when they continually take their cues from Matt Drudge headlines, isn't Gibbs' tardiness a virtue and not a vice?

The Man Who Still Rules Their World

This is really a jump the shark moment for Matt Drudge, who is only relevant to the Gang of 500, anyway.

The markets opened this morning with a sustained decline, which Reuters attributed to a new “report showing yet more deterioration in the housing market.” Matt Drudge, however, wanted to blame it on President Obama, so he posted an auto updating graph of the Dow Jones Industrial average. Under that, in large block letters, Drudge asked, WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID? But as the day passed, the market rebounded, and Drudge was left suggesting that Obama was responsible for the rally. Drudge couldn’t let that stand so, several minutes later, he changed the headline: MARKET REBOUNDS. But then, shortly before the closing at 4:00 PM, the market declined again. What did Drudge do? He hurriedly changed it back, typos and all: WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID?">WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID?

We all know that every minute of market activity is dictated entirely by the utterances of whoever is President at that time, so Drudge is surely on solid footing here. So I'm sure this embarrassment is just a temporary setback for him. After all, markets rarely fluctuate over the course of a day.

I'm also fairly certain this will cause approximately no member of the chattering class to reassess their reliance on headlines and news stories hand-picked by someone who today revealed himself to be a complete idiot.

Zombie Liars And The Right-Wing Puke Funnel

Media Matters chronicles the evolution of a wingnut talking point, where Rush reads something, distorts it, bounces it to Drudge and the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Fox, and then Rush cites the chatter as an "example" of how the talking point is growing. It's all so depressingly familiar.

Wall Street Journal senior economic writer Stephen Moore and Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly promoted on February 10 the falsehood that the economic recovery bill includes a provision that would, in Moore's words, "hav[e] the government essentially dictate treatments." Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey apparently originated the false claim in a February 9 Bloomberg "commentary," which Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge touted that day. Indeed, Moore credited Limbaugh, saying of the provision, "I just learned of this myself yesterday. In fact, Rush Limbaugh made a big deal out of it on his radio show and it just -- it caused all sorts of calls into congressional offices." Limbaugh later took credit for spreading this story, saying during the February 10 edition of his radio show: "Betsy McCaughey writing at Bloomberg, I found it. I detailed it for you, and now it's all over mainstream media. Well, it's -- it headlined Drudge for a while last night and today. Fox News is talking about it."

The name "Betsy McCaughey" may not be totally familiar to you, but it may interest you to know that perhaps nobody is more responsible for the fact that America is the only industrialized nation on Earth without a universal health care system than her. The latest distortion, that because of the health IT provisions in the stimulus - backed by every side of the ideological spectrum from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich - a National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will

...monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions.

Now, I can't think of anyone who should be more worried about electronic medical records being made public than Rush Limbaugh, but McCaughey is predictably peddling nonsense here. It talks about doctors having "complete, accurate information" to guide patients' care, but nothing about a federal bureaucracy having any authority to do the same. It's a deliberate lie, a misreading of the language of the bill.

But McCaughey, a Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, has a long history of distorting legislation to scare Americans about "socialized medicine." She was the writer of the long New Republic piece, allowed into the magazine by then-editor Andrew Sullivan, that slandered the Clinton health care plan with one lie after another. James Fallows provides the history, with a telling reminder of how the Village worked to screw health care reform in the 1990s:

Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,

"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose, n'est-ce pas? Gary Wills has more on McCaughey's lies.

This is how the conventional wisdom often gets set in Washington - an article that "the right people" read builds among the chattering class and then is distilled out to the people, no matter its veracity. While zombies like McCaughey are still churning out the lies, there's a whole new set - Rush, Drudge, Fox - of opinion leaders that get to set the agenda on these matters. Drudge still rules their world.

They Need To Come Up With Something Bigger Than "FAIL" To Describe This

OK, so now it comes out that the McCain campaign was feeding reporters that now-discredited story about the campaign staffer attacked by an Obama supporter because of her bumper sticker.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.

This is just a disaster for the right wing. They lived by these B.S. stories for so long and now they're dying by them. It's extremely appropriate.

And hopefully, this signals the end of Matt Drudge and the ushering in of a new sobriety where people desire actual news and information instead of nonsense links to irrelevant gotcha stories. Indeed, just today Eric Boehlert writes:

Was Drudge just trying to prove our point?

About how his influence has cratered during his campaign cycle? And how, since the Wall Street meltdown began six weeks ago, his brand of shallow, partisan, GOP gotcha attacks have been completely ineffective?

Well, yesterday he went all in on the very hard-to-believe tale from Pittsburgh about the McCain supporter who was mugged and whose assailant carved a "B" in her face after becoming enraged about her GOP loyalties.

It was The Drudge Report that posted blaring headlines about the story, and it was The Drudge Report that tried to push the story into the mainstream media, perhaps in one last attempt to leave its mark on the campaign.

Well, Drudge did leave a mark. Just not the one he wanted.

It's hard not to feel schadenfreude over this. I can't say that I've ever read Drudge more than once or twice in my life, but the way that the traditional media follows his every utterance is disturbing. Maybe not so much anymore.

Touchy, Touchy

John McCain, who has delusions of Kerry-dom dancing in his head (not entirely delusional with this sorry Republican field, though somebody oughta tell him that John Keery lost), is pushing back dramatically against a rumor of a New York Times story promoted by Drudge. If this doesn't show how Matt Drudge rules the world of the political class, I don't know what does. Drudge, whose 15 minutes of fame actually ended in 1998 but nobody told the media, who artificially inflates his own Web stats to deceive his advertisers, has a pathetic amount of reach into the general population. But because his reach into the desks of the Russert-ites is large, and because McCain is essentially running a media campaign based on getting free coverage, any chink in his armor among that class would torpedo him. So he has to push back vigorously against an Internet rumor.

"It is unfortunate that rumor and gossip enter into political campaigns. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving this country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the important issues facing our country.

"Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics. John McCain is the most experienced and prepared to lead as commander and chief, and he will continue to run a positive campaign on the issues."

Somebody protesting too much? Well how about the fact that he's not only lobbying the editor of the NYT to deep-six the story, but he's hired Bill Clinton's old lawyer:

The Arizona Republican has hired a prominent Washington criminal attorney, Robert Bennett, to deal with the matter. "What is being done to John McCain is an outrage," Bennett said in an interview.

This doesn't pass the smell test. You don't hire a lawyer to rebut a rumor. You hire a lawyer because you're in legal trouble. So this story must not only be damaging, but reveal some criminal liability that would spark an FBI investigation. There's no other way to read it.

You actually don't need a new article to portray John McCain as a complete hypocrite on federal spending. His views on war, not just supporting the Iraq war but all war, provides billions of dollars to his buddies in the defense industry in Arizona. War is good for business in his home state. So his supporters benefit from the bloated defense budget more than practically any other state. So spare me the talk of St. McCain the king of porkbusting.

Fiddling With Themselves While Rome Burns

The insaneosphere is consumed by a fire - no, not the one that could cause a major blackout in San Diego. No, this fire concerns Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose writings for The New Republic about life in Iraq have been "discredited" even though nobody discredited them. Drudge (no link) claims to have new information proving that Beauchamp's stories were false. Except they don't prove anything.

I would tell you what I thought of the leaked documents if the links at Drudge worked. From Kevin’s snippet, it appears that the latest transcript show that Beauchamp basically told everyone to piss off, that he just wanted everything to go away. Or, precisely what anyone with a brain would have predicted he would do (note the date I wrote that- 10 September) once the nutters had the brass jumping down his throat.

And then Drudge pulled everything back. And the "confession" isn't a confession, even according to The Cornerites.

Baghdad Diarist [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

We're hearing from The New Republic that the Drudge story isn't the damning evidence it suggests to be ... stay tuned.

UPDATE: An editor there e-mails: "Go to the story and click on the link that he claims is to Beauchamp’s confession. It’s not there. The only Beauchamp document is one were he acknowledged receiving some other memo. Nothing even close to a confession there." At the moment I can't access any of the documents that are flagged in that "Developing" story....

Hey guys, a substantial portion of the West Coast is on fire. Want to keep it together? Do a little prioritizing, maybe? Or do you want to have to clean the umpteenth egg from your face?

Drudge Rules Our World

So Michelle Obama gives a stock line about how "if you can't run your own house, you can't run the White House," and some nutjob at the Chicago Tribune with Clinton on the brain decides to play it as an attack on Hillary, and Drudge links, and all of a sudden every cable news broadcast in America is running with it.

The traditional media should give us a week off. If they stopped talking about politics for a whole week, maybe candidates and the American people would start discussing the actual issues facing their lives.

Nah, pipe dream...

Gimme Drudge, Man

An LA Times reporter begs for a Matt Drudge link.

Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they'll have something that catches Drudge's fancy — or, as he has put it, "raises my whiskers." Most keep their fingers crossed that he'll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.

This is not at all surprising when you see how the profit motive has grown far greater in stature than creating decent journalism. As papers move onto the Web, individual reporters must get eyeballs for their stories, and Drudge links are the way to get them. This is not an indictment of one reporter, but of the whole system.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Matt Drudge

So, in the face of John McCain lying about his leisurely stroll through Baghdad (not only didn't he mention the 100 troops, 3 Black Hawks, and 2 Apaches guiding his way, he neglected to point out the pre-stroll sweeps of the area by other soldiers), the only thing the right-wing could do was lie right back about somebody else to throw everybody off the track:

Yesterday, right-wing Internet gossip Matt Drudge posted an “exclusive” report — based on an anonymous, unnamed source — claiming that Ware had acted inappropriately during a weekend press conference and implying that Ware is an alcoholic:

“During a live press conference in Bagdad [sic], Senators McCain and Graham were heckled by CNN reporter Michael Ware. An official at the press conference called Ware’s conduct ‘outrageous,’ saying, ‘here you have two United States Senators in Bagdad [sic] giving first-hand reports while Ware is laughing and mocking their comments. I’ve never witnessed such disrespect. This guy is an activist not a reporter.’”

Not true, according to Ware: “I did not heckle the senator. Indeed, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even ask a question. In fact, when I raised my hand to ask a question, the press conference abruptly ended.”

By the way, the wingnuts should get their allies straight from their detractors. It turns out that Ware has called the Democrats' proposal for withdrawal "a gift to Al Qaeda." He has no political agenda, he has been living in Baghdad for about four years and he reports what he sees.

Which is why he has to be silenced by the likes of Drudge, who's pretty much never right about anything. And the guppies of the right blogosphere went along for the ride. Idiots.

(Also, Drudge is basing his entire "Ware's a drunk" theory off a joke that Ware made on Bill Maher's show last year. Crack reporting.)

UPDATE: McCain's market - safe one day, under sniper fire the next. I wonder why?

UPDATE II: There's now video of the press conference showing no heckling, not even so much as a peep from Michael Ware, although he does raise his hands at the end, at which point they abruptly end the press conference.

In the annals of Republican horseshit, this may be the horseshittiest.