In case you were wondering why the quality of journalism coming out of Washington is so Piss poor, David Broder explains here…

Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove. In the days when he was operating from Austin, we had many long and rewarding conversations. I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of the historic cabin Karl and his wife Darby found miles away and had carted to its present site on their land.

It isn’t simply that they’re mindlessly parroting the talking points of whoever occupies the White House, as even a faint recollection of the unmitigated hostility Bill Clinton got from them recalls.  No.  They’re see themselves as part of that republican ruling elite now.  There’s David Broder, the man they call the "dean" of Washington journalism, happily recalling his times eating quail…Quail, mind you…with Karl Rove in his historic cabin.  And no…I strongly doubt they went out hunting quail beforehand.  Not with Cheney anyway.

Sorta puts Broder’s crack about how the Clinton’s came in and "trashed the place" into perspective doesn’t it?  Read that Sally Quinn column…it’s one big long inside the beltway bellyache about Clinton and Monica…and ask yourself where the puffed up moral outrage is over…oh say, Guantanamo Bay, the shredding of the Geneva Convention, torture, the destruction of New Orleans, the use of the Department of Justice as a weapon against political opponents and against dissent, being lied into a war that’s killed thousands of young Americans who had their whole lives ahead of them, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of the people we allegedly went to war to liberate.  Don’t see it?  Well there’s a reason for that.  The Washington news establishment all regarded the Clinton team as nothing more then poor southern white trash in Their Town and that’s why they hated them.  That’s all that mattered to them then, and it’s all that matters to them now.

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon details the step-by-step process of how the right wing smear machine gets its message into our feckless mainstream news media.  From the right wing gutter, to Drudge, to more mainstream right wing columnists, to the wire services, and then to the Wise Old Men Of Washington, and the mainstream news media at large.  Greenwald details recent case in point. 

One should note here that Step 5, the Final Stage, is almost always sponsored by those who endlessly proclaim how irresponsible and substance-free and unserious political bloggers are, and who thereafter write pieces which do nothing other than repeat the latest Drudge gossip.

You should go read it, because we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing when the 2008 presidential campaign really gets going.

Via Talking Points Memo …  Today’s Washington Post is not the Washington Post that once brought down a crooked president.  Today’s Washington posts runs propaganda pieces on behalf of one…

Okay, this is pretty interesting. I think I’ve found something which reasonably suggests that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt may have broken his own stated Op-ed policies by publishing a piece yesterday by Liz Cheney attacking Nancy Pelosi without identifying Ms. Cheney as Veep Cheney’s daughter.

When I asked Hiatt about this yesterday, he justified it with an email to me (again, I appreciate his willingness to answer) saying that she’d been selected to write the piece based on her professional qualifications alone and that there was thus no need to disclose her relationship with dad.

Knowing that they were reading a hit piece written by the Vice President’s daughter would only have confused their readers. 

So…Andrew Sullivan would like us to know that Don Imus isn’t really all that bad…inexcusable though his bigotry is…

The Imus Ranch

It does amazing things for some very sick and needy children. It does not excuse Imus’ bigotry, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. It’s more than I’ve ever done for sick kids. And probably more than you have either.

What Digby said…  See…what you need to paying attention to in the story about Imus…isn’t what Imus did…

As the media elite and various political insiders continue to behave as if they’ve just been hit over the head with a cudgel on this Imus matter, perhaps they should wake up and recognize that there have been people out there noticing the raw hypocrisy among this Imus Elite for years. And this does not just come from the more recent bloviating by scruffy bloggers in their deplorable "efficiency" apartments…

Hey man…don’t fuck with Vinny…

There have always been a handful of columnists and journalists who got it. And no one got it better than the late Lars Erik Nelson:

. . . 

Washington Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) came to the Senate floor with a look of sad concern on his face. He was deeply troubled, he said, at the vulgar, morally repugnant content of the new TV season. "We are lowering the standards of what is acceptable in our society and we are sending a message to our children," he said. He denounced an "acceptance of rude language, foul imagery and gross behavior in the entertainment mainstream."

Then, warning parents who might be watching on C-SPAN to move their little children away from the TV sets, Lieberman cited a few of the outrages: On ABC’s "Wilde Again," a character asks to be called "Daddy’s little whore." Another ABC program showed an upraised middle finger. CBS’ "Bless This House" used the phrase "little hooters" in reference to a girl’s breasts. "Profoundly disturbing," Lieberman intoned. "Sophomoric."

Funny thing: The previous morning, Lieberman had been a guest, as is his regular custom, on the Don Imus radio show on WFAN…

And as it turns out, there were a lot of other self righteous congressional scolds stopping by the Imus show back then.  Democrats and republicans, chasing the vote in Imus’ young white male demographic.  And did our mainstream news media ever bother to point out the hypocrisy of politicians bellyaching about the decay of television entertainment while appearing regularly on one of talk radio’s biggest cesspools?  Oh grow up.

There’s a phrase you hear now and then in political campaigning…Dog Whistle Politics.  It’s the art of using certain words and catch phrases that a specifically targeted audience will hear and respond to, while going over the heads of most of the rest of the audience as a whole.  The republicans, and in particular the Bush team, are masters of the dog whistle.  A good example of it was when Bush said that the Iraq war would "look just like a comma" to future historians.  It raised a lot of hackles that Bush would trivialize a war that had killed so many, wounded so many and was still killing and wounding.  But as Ian Welsh pointed out in The Agonist, it was a dog whistle to his hard core religious right base, recalling the proverb "Never put a period where God has put a comma."

It may be hard to think of Imus as a kind of dog whistle, but bear with me.  The audience that Lieberman and all the others were trying to appeal to when they went on their crusade for TV decency wouldn’t be caught dead tuning into Don Imus cesspool, even out of curiosity.  That kind of thing just disgusts the hell out of them.  So all the voters who would have been nodding their heads approvingly while Lieberman and other politicians were puffing themselves up condemning all the tits and ass on prime time TV, wouldn’t be regular listeners to Imus anyway.  The only people who would have known the extent of their hypocrisy, because they’d seen it with their own two eyes, were the news media talking heads who were also Imus regulars…and they kept their mouths shut too because they had books to sell on his show.  So the politicians get to troll Imus for votes among that hard to reach resentful young white male demographic at the same time they’re trolling for votes among the shocked middle class soccer mom demographic.

And now the lot of them are all looking like they’ve just been caught in a police raid on a whorehouse. 

By all means, Lieberman, Bradley, Dole and the rest should go on Imus. But if they do, spare us the sanctimonious sermons about the vulgarity of modern broadcasting.

They never stopped. in fact three years later Lieberman took to the floor of the Senate and "helped" Bill Clinton by saying to the whole world that he was immoral. All of these moral scolds, but most especially Lieberman, are rank hypocrites.

I do not want to hear another word from these people about civility, rudeness and the decline of the discourse. And I certainly don’t want to hear any more BS about blogging ethics and good manners on the internet from any of them. For more than a decade we had to endure lectures from many of these people about "values" and more recently we’ve had to listen to them call for the smelling salts over the degradation of the public square from the barbaric polloi. Yet throughout they loved to hang around with that overgrown adolescent and let him sell their books for him when he wasn’t cruelly disparaging everything in his sights, including them. If those are the decent values Joe Lieberman has been braying about incessantly for the last decade, he certainly got what what he was looking for.

This has been another edition of What Digby Said… 

You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years
–Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News, speaking before New York University journalism students.

Hey man, don’t fuck with Vinny…

From No More Mister Nice Blog…

IMUS AND "THE BLACK BEATLES"

I don’t know when this aired, and I’ve never seen it on any list of Imus’s racist bits, but it’s pretty awful.

You can listen to it at the link here, and also here and here.

Transcript:

IMUS: Some of you may know, who listen to the Imus in the Morning program on a regular basis, there is a new group being formed called the Black Beatles.

BLACK BEATLES MEMBER (in a stereotypical black accent): That’s right, Don. My name is Tyrone McCartney…

IMUS: Uh-huh.

TYRONE McCARTNEY: … bass player for the fabulous Black Beatles, and me and my friends Leroy Lennon, George Jellybean Darnell Rashad Mustafa Muhammad Harrison, and Bingo Starr, we have a new album out of our very famous #1 hits called Beat the Meatles.

IMUS: What’s that?

TYRONE McCARTNEY: Beat the Meatles. We wanted y’all to get it ’cause it’s got some of our famous #1 hits, like this one: (singing) "When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary come to me and speak those woids of wisdom, ‘What it be.’"

And how ’bout this one? (singing) "I shoulda known better with a bitch like you." "Jo Jo was a man who only had three inches, but he knew it wouldn’t last, Jo Jo never had much luck with all the bitches, but I said, ‘Hey, Jo, get black. Get black, get black, get black and watch your johnson grow.’" "Lucy in the sky with a lot of jewelry on." "Strawberry-flavored malt liquor." "Here come my son, he play football. Here come my son, and I say, ‘He bad.’" "I’m back on the old FDR." "Yesterday, my parole came through just yesterday." "Hey dude, lend me a dollar." "I can play center, I can play forward, I be six foot four."

And, of course, my personal favorite: (singing) "We all live in a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville. And my friends is all aboard, many more of them is in the trunk, vinyl tires with wire wheels, in my yellow Coupe de Ville."

Swell.  Just swell.

IMUS: A lot of friends of mine called, but I didn’t want to put up — put anybody on this morning who wasn’t scheduled, because I can make my own case, and it is what it is.

OLIPHANT: But to me, that only means that those of us who, through an accident, were scheduled, who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."

Right Tom.  "We all live in a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville. 

Via Brad DeLong…  Here’s one another black female target of Imus’ good ‘ol boy humor has to say…

Trash Talk Radio – New York Times: LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather. The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before. I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton. Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program. It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me. It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well. So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field. Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

I’m old enough to remember when it was merely taken for granted that white males had the right to piss on everyone who wasn’t white and male.  That was in addition to having the right to piss on everyone who Was white and male and below them on the economic ladder.  Ever wonder why poor whites consistently vote republican against their better economic interests, especially in certain parts of this country?  It’s because racism gives them status, even over well-off people of color.  Without racism they’re just another face on the bottom of the pile.  The resentment these people feel, and have felt ever since the black civil rights movement began tearing down the walls of race segregation in America, are enormous and run very, very deep.  They feel as though they’ve lost their place, their status, Their Manhood, in a country that was once theirs…them and the rich white men holding them and everyone else down on the economic ladder.  Rich white men like Don Imus…but more to the point, his producers…the people that make his radio and TV platform possible with their money, and their radio and TV networks.

They give Imus his platform to play his Good ‘Ol Boy shtick, knowing full well who it plays to, knowing full well it allows that audience to imagine itself as part of the same privileged class as the rich white guys who own the airwaves.  They’d be escorted quickly to the door by well dressed butlers wearing gloves so as not to get their hands dirty if they ever showed up in any of the exclusive clubs and playgrounds the people who pay for Imus’ broadcasts enjoy.  But for a few moments listening to him going through his crude, racist, bigoted Good ‘Ol Boy patter routine, they can imagine that they’re all comrades in arms, all sharing the same bitter resentments toward the uppity darkies, women, and faggots who used to know their place.

So it’s spectacularly unsurprising to see the simple, straightforward reflex of Imus and his crew to spit in the faces of a group of young black girls who had succeeded where nobody thought they would.  That’s What They’re On The Radio For.  This gutter crawling racism on Imus’ part isn’t anything new…nor is it anything particularly out of place on Talk Radio.  That’s why talk radio has the large audience it does.

And that large audience, is why Talk Radio’s big names are held in high regard by the guardians of mainstream media opinion…why Rush Limbaugh and Imus and others of their kind can command the respect of the mainstream news media and its pundocracy, even as that pundocracy wags, wags, wags its finger at bloggers…well…progressive bloggers anyway…for being such an uncouth, uncivilized rabble.  There’s no double standard here.  No hypocrisy.  The moral standard is, as always, money.  How many of copies of our books can you sell? 

Thus we have the squeaky clean mild mannered Wally Cox of the pundocracy, Tom Oliphant, rising his fist in solidarity with comrade Imus…

OLIPHANT: What I thought would be instructive for people is to go back on the tape to a minute or so before this happens and see if you can see it developing. Now, believe me, as you well know, I don’t know beans about hip-hop culture or trash-talking, or what do you call those things where you run on forever? Riffs, or whatever.

But even I could see the beginning of what appeared to me to be a riff. And the train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do. And that’s why I, you know, didn’t have a moment’s hesitation talking to this guy from The New York Times yesterday. Of course I didn’t think about reacting like that because I saw the whole episode in context, including your statements about it.

No Tom…the train didn’t go off the tracks.  It arrived at it’s destination on time, and on schedule.  And…oh look…you’re heading for that same destination too, aren’t you..?  

IMUS: A lot of friends of mine called, but I didn’t want to put up — put anybody on this morning who wasn’t scheduled, because I can make my own case, and it is what it is.

OLIPHANT: But to me, that only means that those of us who, through an accident, were scheduled, who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.

ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.

IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and —

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.

IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough —

McCORD: Do The Right Thing.

McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?

ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.

IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.

RUFFINO: Only tougher.

McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.

Solidarity Forever…

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Welcome to the gutter Tom.  I hear book sales are pretty brisk once you get that initial sale of your soul taken care of…

I’m going to steal this shtick from Atrios, but I don’t think he’ll mind…

So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for "managed civil speech" (which is claimed to be "freer" than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done "voluntarily" and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)

Meanwhile, on the media page is a story about the execrable Don Imus and the fact that he routinely makes racist, misogynistic and eliminationist jokes on his show while half the Washington press corps spends time there kissing his ring. For some reason that kind of "incivility" doesn’t upset the journalistic prima donnas half as much as the uncivil blogosphere does.

So what’s up with this? The blogosphere is admittedly an uncivil place. Nobody disputes that. But it is comprised of a bunch of disparate individuals who are arguing amongst themselves with varying degress of seriousness and talent as part of the national (and international) dialog. There is a corner of it that is despicable and revolting, as the misogyny that set off this latest debate clearly demonstrates. But for inexplicable reasons it’s the liberal blogosphere that is being particularly attacked for our alleged incivility by the mainstream media. (I suspect it’s the fact that we drop the "F" bomb too much, which is simply shocking in American life)

However, for almost two decades now, talk radio has been spewing vile racist, misogynistic and eliminationst spew — and their stars have been feted and petted for it among the highest levels of the capital cognoscenti. I don’t know for sure why that would be, but I have my suspicions.

Go Read the whole thing…  

This has been another edition of What Digby Said… 

Via Atrios…via Digby…  Okay…Now I understand why that gutter crawling bigot Don Imus is so popular among the Washington Beltway glitterati.  I was always puzzled by that, always kept wondering how many times that babbling bar stool bigot would have to go over the line before someone finally booted his ass off the radio.  Yet every time I look in his direction I see that he’s just gotten bigger, and Even More respected.  What the fuck was it about this low-life crank’s power to attract big names onto his show?  Now I know.  His blessing on their books directly translates into book sales…

I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:

"They don’t make good decisions," he says of MSNBC and its programming. "You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan." Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: "He’s a twit. He’s a pussy." This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist ("a fucking criminal"). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, "There’s that idiot," to no one in particular.

It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a "good man."This might explain it:

I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.

He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.

I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, "I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!"

I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, "Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty." I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: "There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks." He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were "horrible," but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an "animal" and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks "profoundly rude," vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.

It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the "angry left" — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Well that about sums up the history of the mainstream news media ever since Reagan, doesn’t it?  They followed the big money into the gutter.  They followed the big money into the gutter.  And they’ve been busy trying to drag their country into the gutter along with them ever since, so they won’t have to know that they’re not living on main street anymore, but in the gutter.

Via Atrios…  ABC News is now peddling the claim that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2009.  Perhaps that’s true.  But your gay and lesbian neighbors have watched ABC whitewash the murder of a gay kid for the sake of validating republican party talking points.  And as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, it isn’t the first time the American Bullshit Corporation has looked its trusting audience in the face and fed them…bullshit…

At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.

Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:

(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";

(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";

(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";

(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,

(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…

The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says.  That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies.  Who do we trust?  Well…not ABC News.  We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting.  Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.

The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.

Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.

The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:

Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).

Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."

Go read the whole thing.  The drumbeat to war is happening again.  Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points.  Nothing is beneath them.  Nothing.

So…here’s the scenario.  A young gay man is found brutally murdered.  The murder scene shows the classic evidence of overkill.  The killers, leaving behind not only a host of physical evidence, but statements to friends about how they’d just "killed a faggot", are quickly apprehended.  Then as news of the vicious murder percolates, first  through the gay community news channels, and then, somehow, manages to find its way into the  consciousness of the nation at large, and people recoil at the senseless brutality of it, we begin to hear that the gay victim of the crime had been out cruising for sex, or was looking for drugs, or some sort of criminal activity, had gone willingly with his killers, who by then look in their newspaper perp walk photos like they had "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads…and you can almost hear the sigh of relief from one end of the country to the other…because now we know it wasn’t really hate that killed the victim, there is no hate in America, and especially not any systematic hatred directed at homosexuals…it’s their own stupidity after all, that keeps getting them killed…

Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…

Sound familiar?  Matthew Shepard?   No…

Official Misstatements about Ryan Skipper’s Murder Have Been Propagated in the Media

One of the saddest aspects about the aftermath of Ryan Skipper’s murder is that no one outside his friends and family seems to care about the heinous manner in which he was killed.

Neither the governor nor the attorney general in Florida — both of whom are Republicans — has expressed concern about the fact that Skipper’s murder has been labeled a hate crime. National gay organizations have been largely mute, and coverage in the local and national gay press has been very slim, especially considering the brutality of his murder.

Sheriff’s Assertions Were Based on Killers’ Statements

It is likely that the lack of outrage stems from a series of misstatements to the media at the outset of the investigation that have been attributed to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and others in his office. One the face of it, the motivation for making these statements appears to be bigotry toward gay people.

On Friday, March 16, two days after Skipper’s body was discovered, the local newspaper, The Ledger, reported:

Skipper, 25, was driving around Eloise late Tuesday night looking to pick up someone when he met [his all edged killer, Joseph] Bearden, whom he took back to his home in Winter Haven, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The next day, the paper ran a quote from Sheriff Judd that sounded like it could have been the basis of the earlier reporting:

“What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening,” Judd said.

Elsewhere, the full quote has been given as:

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.” [Emphasis added.]

In fact — and as we have said in other coverage of this story — Sheriff Judd did not “know” this. It was immediately obvious to my colleague Trish, who reported the story here on March 18, that, since the victim was dead and could not speak for himself, the only source for this information had to have been the alleged killers.

But the slander against Ryan Skipper did not stop there. In its coverage on March 17, The Ledger published the trawling-for-sex allegation as well as three additional completely unsubstantiated statements:

[1] Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [murder suspect Joe] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. [2] The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they [3] smoked marijuana and [4] discussed using Skipper’s [laptop] computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Three weeks later all four of these statements are in dispute:

• No one who knew Ryan Skipper believes he had a propensity for trawling for anonymous sex.
• The other alleged murderers, William Brown, was an acquaintance of Skipper’s. We have seen a statement from one of Ryan’s roommates that Ryan got a call after he got home from work at 10:30 that night, which appeared to have prompted him to go back out. It seems more likely that Brown phoned Ryan and asked for help in the form of giving him ride somewhere, and that the call was part of premeditated ambush plot by Brown and Bearden against Ryan.
• No evidence has been produced that Ryan was involved with these chuckleheads in a check forgery scheme — and no one who knew him believes he would do anything of the sort.
• Ryan’s roommate has said that after Ryan received the phone call, he left and never came back. She denies that he brought anyone home with him that night.
• Ryan’s friends and family all confirm that he had a desktop computer but did not own a laptop. And yet, early reports stated that Brown and Bearden were charged with stealing a laptop from Ryan after they murdered him..
• No one who knew him believes Ryan smoked pot.

That the "trawling for sex" story is so reaily accepted by the mainstream news media when it comes to gay victims of violent crime, Even When The Source Of The Story Is The Victim’s Own Killers, is all the proof you need that there is a climate of contempt toward gays right here in America, that is relentlessly fueling that violence.  No climate of hate in America?  Compare and contrast…a white jogger is raped and nearly killed in New York’s Central Park and the focus slams immediately on a gaggle of black teenagers who were said to be out "wilding" that night.  Nobody suggests the woman was out looking for rough sex.  Had that woman been a gay man instead, does anyone seriously believe that the Very First Thing out the gate in the mainstream press wouldn’t be that he was probably there looking for sex.

Ryan Skipper walks out the door to his apartment and is found dead hours later with 20 stab wounds in his body, and his car is found later with the insides soaked in his blood.  The killers are arrested, claim their victim was hitting them up for sex and anyway he was helping them forge checks.  It’s just their word at that point, but guess what the Accepted Narrative is the following day…

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”

And we know that how precisely?  We know it, because his killers said so, and because he was a gay man, and gay men always do something stupid to cause their own deaths…just ask Elizabeth Vargas and ABC News …

O’Malley was a detective with the Laramie Police when 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered six years ago.

He was one of several people interviewed for ABC’s 20/20 that aired Nov. 26. He said that the interview and the way the show was ultimately put together has left him angry.

O’Malley was notified about a week in advance of the ABC crew’s arrival for the interview. He invited them into his home and they stayed for “maybe three to four hours.”

He did not see the tape until the night the show aired.

The people interviewed for the show did not surprise him. He was, however, surprised that “a production as popular as 20/20 would hinge all of their support for their theory on meth addicts, Doc O’Connor and two convicted murderers … it did not surprise me the way the thing came out.”

O’Malley said that he did find out what the focus of the show was shortly after the interview was over and the crew left Laramie. Someone with the crew had left copies of e-mails on his dining room table — 10 pages of information discussing the overall focus of the program and “their pre-conceived focus that this was not a hate crime. This was a drug crime. That’s what they went with,” he said.

When he was approached by the producers of this particular segment, O’Malley said he had a weird feeling. “After 30 years, you learn to trust your gut instinct. I asked them specifically if they were coming to do something from a particular angle … I wanted to be able to answer intelligently, think things out.”

In the conversation with the producers, O’Malley was assured that the report would be objective, six years after the actual event.

Sucker. 

Prior to the arrival of the 20/20 crew, he had heard that the show might be more about the methamphetamine issue. When they arrived at his home, O’Malley asked a few questions of his own.

“I was trying to be comfortable … and I felt comfortable. But when Elizabeth Vargas got into the methamphetamine portion of it, it surprised me,” he said. “Actually, it made me extremely angry and, in my opinion, these guys lied to me.”

During the segment of the 20/20 program, O’Malley said that he believed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two Laramie men convicted in Shepard’s death, intended to rob the University of Wyoming student. But, for reasons only McKinney and Henderson know, something happened and the killing became a hate crime based on Shepard’s sexual orientation.

“My feelings have been that the initial contact was probably motivated by robbery because they needed money,” O’Malley said. “What they got was $20 and a pair of shoes. … then something changed and changed profoundly.”

But whatever that was, it couldn’t be hate.  No.  Never.

20/20 did not discuss the expertise of the arresting officer.

“Flint Waters is a trained narcotics officer. … in controlled substances,” O’Malley said.

Waters reported that Henderson exhibited no signs of being under the influence of meth, just an odor of alcohol.

O’Malley said that 20/20 failed to report on the jailhouse letters that McKinney had written — letters that added information that this could have been a gay-hate crime.

The 20/20 segment with McKinney indicated that he, along with his lawyers, had concocted this gay panic issue, but, according to O’Malley, police interviews with McKinney showed that he had already started that (the gay panic issue) without the benefit of council.

“The statements he made, the fact that after he was sentenced he was high-fiving other inmates and signing autographs in the jail — if it wasn’t motivated by bias, he was sure eating that up.” O’Malley said.

Shepard was struck between 19 and 21 times, all to the face and head area.

“It was a concentrated effort to destroy somebody,” O’Malley said. “I believe it was triggered because Matt was gay. I’ll go to my grave believing that.”

O’Malley said that “It is abysmal that they (20/20) don’t present the other side of the issue … to be objective in their reporting.”

But they had a job to do…not merely to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard, but more importantly, to undermine the fight against anti-gay hate.  The problem for ABC New and other Bush/Republican Friendly mainstream news media outlets, is that for the nation to finally begin to combat the kind of hate that killed Matthew Shepard means taking away one of the republicans better vote getting tools…

So Matthew Shepard’s murder, against all the evidence to the contrary, had to be a drug deal gone bad, and Shepard a druggy, or trawling for sex, or something.  And the payoff wasn’t just hope that his killers might be paroled, but breathing life into the cultural indifference to anti-gay violence, which at that moment in time was seriously in jeopardy of, finally, being taken seriously for the unmitigated horror that it is.  It’s not so much about the gay panic defense, as the gay panic vote.  You can’t drive voters to the polls with the gay bogeyman, without getting some gay people killed in the process.  It has to be their own damn fault they got themselves killed, not the climate of hate.  Never the climate of hate.

Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”

So ABC and Vargas’ did their job and you can see the results of it now, in the case of Ryan Skipper with sickening clarity. The meme that gay victims of violent crime always, somehow, bring it on themselves, were idiots who should have seen it coming, went cruising for guys who have "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads, fell prey to a kind of crime that the rest of us need not worry about, because We’re Smart And We Don’t Do Things Like That, will probably live on for quite some time to come. Hate crime laws are unnecessary, because the victims of these kinds of crimes are always stupid. There is no epidemic of violence against gay people, just an epidemic of stupidity. You are now free to look the other way. Pay no attention to that blood on the floor…it doesn’t concern you…

A few minor changes to my diet, and I can just about get back into my 31s again (that’s 31 inch waste jeans).  Except…I gave my 31s all to Goodwill in despair several summers ago.  Oh Ye Of Little Faith…

My diet has simply been to stop eating junk food and between meal Kit-Kat bars, potato chips, Doritos…that sort of stuff I basically snacked on all day long not too long ago.  I was used to getting the energy kick in the afternoons from the Kit-Kat bars, and Hershey bars, and Ghirardelli bars, and little did I know how many goddamned calories I was consuming in a day.  Now when I get a urge for something sweet I’ll go have a couple slices of apple.  I like the Red Delicious ones because they’re…delicious.  And…red.

That’s it.  I still eat out of the deep fryer on a regular basis.  Still eat mostly everything that I used to.  I’ve just cut out the junk stuff between meals.  And I’m using Splenda now instead of sugar in my tea.  And I’ve dropped from 170 to about 148 until just this week, when I’d dropped some more to 146.  My body has thinned out noticeably, and counter intuitively, by eating less, I feel more energetic.  I’m much more active during the day then I used to be.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that a straight co-worker who had gained some weight had suddenly lost it and gotten back into shape again (straight guys put on weight too, after their wives give birth.  It’s true.  I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.).  He said that he was doing the South Beach Diet, and for the first time I got an explanation of what that was.  It struck me as a kinda-sorta modified Atkins, but instead of shunning carbs, it omits the ones that are absorbed quickly by the body.  It also makes a distinction between good and bad fats.  It emphasizes protein initially, and does not require counting calories.

So I adjusted my diet a tad, ate less fried potato and substituted more whole grain breads for the Wonder white I love, and added a tad more eggs and ham.  Nothing major.  Just minor changes.  I’ve heard the quickest way to fail at dieting is to jump into something radical whole hog.  In a couple weeks I’d lost two more pounds.  Just this morning it seemed, all my 32s were a tad too big. I keep this up and I’ll have to go out and buy a bunch of new 31s again.  And…new hip huggers.  It’s money I’ll be absolutely delighted to spend.

I want to emphasize I am not suggesting it will be this easy for everyone.  Nearly all my life I was thin as a rail, and then suddenly in my late thirties I started putting it on.  Sizing it all up now, I think my diet simply took a turn for the worse when I suddenly had money to spend, and I could eat all the junk food I wanted.  But my body just doesn’t want to be that heavy.  It was complaining to me in a number of different ways that I’d always put down to "getting old".  But…damn…I’m feeling just great now.  This is where my body wants to be, I just needed to feed it right.  Your mileage may vary.  I know it’s a real struggle for some folks.  They have to fight their bodies to loose weight.  I was, in a sense, forcing mine to put it on.  Now that I’m not, it’s slimming back down again.

When I was having to wear 33s, and they were starting to get too tight, I sensed my diet was a tad too rich, and I’d put it down to getting older and having a slower metabolism.  But that weight gain Just Happened To Coincide with my getting work as a computer programmer, and having that much better income.  I’m thinking now that it wasn’t my body slowing down at all, or not that much.  I could just afford to indulge my sweet tooth more, and my taste for fast food crap more, and it was wreaking my figure.

I’m reading about the big blow-up at ABC over Isaiah Washington’s insults to fellow Grey’s Anatomy actor T. R. Knight.  Knight is gay and Washington called him a faggot on the set.  Then during the Golden Globe award ceremonies Washington announced to all the assembled reporters that he’d never called Knight a faggot.  You have to admit, the guy has a certain deft charm when it comes to his co-workers.  Seems like now everyone is calling for Washington’s head…

Anatomy of an Insult: ABC Is Stung by an Actor’s Anti-Gay Slurs

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21 — Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.

…

The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.

ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.

Unacceptable.  Unacceptable.  I have a question.  Why is Mr. Washington’s calling Mr. Knight a faggot unacceptable to ABC, but not whitewashing the murder of Matthew Shepard by 20/20?

Ah…here’s why…

The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.

If you piss on the grave of a dead gay kid and it gooses your tabloid news show’s ratings…that’s good business.  But if a fag baiting actor’s antics start cutting into your multi-million dollar profits on your high rated prime time TV series…well, that’s just plain unacceptable. 

And…by the way…I hear the right wing shock jocks at ABC/Disney’s San Francisco talk radio station who called Barack Obama a "halfrican" still have their jobs. 

Brad DeLong catches David Brooks in typical form…

David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:

A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….

This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…

Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:

Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.

Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:

Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.

I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people.  It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class.  People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo.  Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan. 

But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this.  What he’s counting on is that you don’t.  He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now.  My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do.  Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too.  Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield.  On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. “On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”

Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”

The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.

I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”

Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money.  Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause.  Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf.  But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money.  Really…that’s all you need to know about him.