Liz And Chris


There are two kinds (at least) of same-sex marriage opponents in the Republican Party.  And Chris Christie is no Liz Cheney, an underdog candidate for the GOP nomination for senator in Wyoming.  A slightly snide Paul Waldman of the American Prospect recognizes

But if we assume that Liz Cheney always opposed marriage equality, we have to give her some credit for a certain kind of consistency. Back in March, when Republican senator Rob Portman came out in support of same-sex marriage, announcing that he had a change of heart after learning his son is gay, I and other people gave him some criticism for only deciding that discrimination was bad once it turned out someone he loved was among the class being discriminated against. Part of being a good person (and a good politician) should be having the ability to care about people's welfare even if you don't know them.

Dick Cheney, Waldman is careful not to note, is in the Rob Portman class, appearing to support same-sex marriage because his daughter Mary, a veteran Repub activist, is gay and married. But we should give the sister of Mary Cheney (who is betrothed to Heather Poe) the benefit of the doubt and assume she was sincere when she recently stated gay marriage is "just an area where we disagree."  Mary responded by posting on her Facebook page  “Liz — this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree you’re just wrong — and on the wrong side of history.”   Getting into a pis_ _ _ _ match with a member of one's family- especially when the father agrees with his other daughter- is never wise politics, but a risk Liz Cheney was willing to take.

The New Jersey governor, however, is a politician of a different animal.  Steve Kornacki (openly gay and a strong supporter of same-sex marriage), who boasts of being a long-time follower of New Jersey politics and ought to know better, stated Sunday "My take on Christie is like, honest to God, if you gave him the truth serum, if you're sitting here having a conversation off the record, he doesn't care.  He's fine with gay marriage."  Yes, and if you asked every House Republican under the influence of a truth serum what what he or she believes about risking default on the national debt because of their beef with Obamacare, most of them would assure you they don't want to blow up the economy.

But as Susan Page said during the discussion with Kornacki, "There`s no way this Republican Party is nominating a presidential nominee in 2016 who supports the idea of gay marriage. And I`m sure Chris Christie is aware of that."  There may be a nod and a wink involved, but Christie will remain officially opposed to same-sex marriage because Chris Christie is (in a manner foreign to Liz Cheney) is what Chris Christie is about.  As two New York Times reporters wrote late last month, the governor

has long tried to walk a fine line on same-sex marriage, which polls show is popular in his home state, but opposed by conservative voters in important primary states. Last year, he vetoed legislation allowing same-sex marriage, saying voters should decide the issue in a referendum. As recently as last week, he repeated his position that he believed marriage to be between a man and a woman. But he also signed a bill outlawing so-called gay conversion therapy, which angered conservatives.

The governor held out against same-sex marriage until it was no longer convenient for him to do so, when the issue would have dragged on, eroding his numbers in New Jersey.  And the boast that he won big in a Democratic state (and remains popular there) is critical to the message he will bring to Republican primary voters and the media.  That also helps explain why the University of Delaware alumnus and sometime opponent of gay marriage (photo from the Daily Princetonian) is, a la Rudy Giuliani, on board with cross-dressing:

Principles, apparently, are for losing Senate candidates in Wyoming, not for someone who plans to be president.



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Or As He Himself Would Say, "Bull ____"

In April, 2007, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, authors of It's Even Worse than it Looks- How the American Constitution and System Collided with the New Politics of Extemism, observed

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

Political scientists Christopher Hare, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal have compared roll-call votes among Democrats and Republicans from 1879-2011 and  determined Democrats have moved slightly left while Republicans have moved dramatically right since 1976.  While contending that both parties bear blame for the coarsening political climate in Washington, they caution "we should be careful not to equate the two parties’ roles in contemporary political polarization: the data are clear that this is a Republican-led phenomenon where very conservative Republicans have replaced moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats."

Julian Zelizer found "since 2007,the Senate Historical Office has shown, Democrats have had to end Republican filibusters more than 360 times, a historic record."   The video below puts the whole thing into perspective:










Republican obstructionism reached its apex earlier this autumn when, as Paul Krugman put it at the time, "a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both" because "Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party's delusional wing."  It's hard to believe they were unaware

... hitting the ceiling would force a huge, immediate spending cut, almost surely pushing America back into recession. Beyond that, failure to raise the ceiling would mean missed payments on existing U.S. government debt. And that might have terrifying consequences.

Why? Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests. In particular, Treasury bills — short-term U.S. bonds — are what investors demand when they want absolutely solid collateral against loans. Treasury bills are so essential for this role that in times of severe stress they sometimes pay slightly negative interest rates — that is, they’re treated as being better than cash.

Now suppose it became clear that U.S. bonds weren’t safe, that America couldn’t be counted on to honor its debts after all. Suddenly, the whole system would be disrupted. Maybe, if we were lucky, financial institutions would quickly cobble together alternative arrangements. But it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis set off by the failure of Lehman Brothers five years ago.

But as earnestly as some Repubs tried to wreck the economy, GOP intransigence is no more absurd than with presidential nominees (chart below- from statistics compiled by People for the American Way- from Senate Democrats via Senate Minority Leader McConnell's office via Chris Cillizza.  Whew.)  Facing three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court, President Obama has nominated three individuals- each receiving the highest rating from the American Bar Association- and each is being denied an up-or-down vote by the Senate minority.  The obstructionism is not motivated by a concern that any might be unqualified nor even because of ideology, but on the basis of a slick, but extraordinarily facile and transparent, rationalization.

Aside from the most recent incident(s), this is old news, though news largely lost in the mainstream media's "on the one hand, and on the other" meme.   The irony, of course, is that the failure to recognize that one party and one party alone is responsible for gridlock is itself the crassest form of partisanship.  And if there is one spectacularly crass figure in American politics, it is the media's darling, its favorite to become the 45th president of the United States, the governor of New Jersey.    Talking Points Memo reports

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Monday night blasted "absolutists" in Washington, D.C. who can't work across party lines, singling out President Barack Obama and the GOP for criticism.

"It’s about human relationships, the fact of the matter is nobody in this city talks to each other anymore and if they do talk to each other it’s not civilly. They don’t develop relationships, they don’t develop any sense of trust between each other," Christie said at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council conference, as quoted by ABC News. 

Christie blamed Obama, saying the President "has not developed the relationships that are necessary on a personal level on both sides of the aisle," according to ABC News. 

No, it's not because the actors don't have a beer together, or because of Washington, or because of both parties.   It stems from Republicans wanting to bring down a president who wants nothing as much as to get agreement somewhere in the middle between the party he represents and the party which is trying to bring him down.

Christie did acknowledge “I think there were a number of people in Congress on the Republican side of the aisle who just did not have an end-game strategy.”   But that is not much of a concession, given that he added "I’m fine with the Republican Party taking their share of the blame, but I am not fine with the Republican Party taking all the blame because Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi played as many games as the folks on the Republican side did."   He seems to be saying "we blew it. We failed." No kidding.

Chris Christie will win further plaudits from a mainstream media desperate to latch onto a Republican who is not Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.  But Christie's everyone is to blame lament is not only trite and increasingly tiresome but, like the man himself, dishonest.

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Comments- pro, con, or neither- very much welcomed.

The Other Pre-Existing Condition(s)

At a conference in mainland China (of course), Bill Clinton remarked "I hope we have a woman president in my lifetime, and I think it would be a good thing for the world as well as for America."

Better yet- it would be a good thing if we have a good president in his lifetime.  On balance, it wasn't him. As concisely as possibly, Andrew O'Hehir says it best:

By the time Bill Clinton was elected after 12 years of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Lee Atwater had meticulously milked racial grievances to peel away much of the white working class and nearly all the white South. Clinton convinced himself that the only way to govern in the aftermath of Reaganism was through the noxious politics of “triangulation,” which produced welfare reform, “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the enormous neoliberal, job-exporting scams of GATT and NAFTA. We can debate the reasons for the relative prosperity of the Clinton years (no overseas wars to fight), but Clinton was every bit as much a Wall Street president as George W. Bush, helped drive the stock-market and real estate boom that would later turn toxic, and on most substantive policy questions found himself to the right of every 20th-century Republican president not named Ronald Reagan.

Don't take it from O'Hehir (although he has nailed almost everything), but from Bill Clinton himself. In March, citing "freedom, equality, and justice for all," he contended "I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution."  Sponsoring the GATT and the NAFTA, and deregulating Wall Street by signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, have done infinitely more damage to the nation.  (Jim Leach, by then a former congressman, was one of the prominent Republicans who endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. Figures.)  However, Clinton, who slammed the President during the 2012 presidential campaign (!) when Obama dared to question Bain Capital, will never admit to helping foster the Great Recession when he enabled Wall Street.  His friends (and daughter and son-in-law)  in private equity might not like him anymore.

And Clinton 42 hasn't changed his spots.    Noting in a magazine interview that people were being dropped from their insurance company plans, last week he stated  "They were the ones who heard the promise, if you like what you’ve got you can keep it.   I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to these people and let them keep what they got."

That provided cover for skittish Democrats to pressure the President.  Soon afterward, Obama apologized even though, as Dean Baker explains

...the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

Or as Bill Maher noted (video, below) far more caustically on Friday's Real Time

Obamacare was trying to protect these people who are being ripped off by insurance companies. But, yesterday, Obama said, 'Okay finally. 'You know what? You want your shitty, crummy plans? You can have them!' You want your policy where you go in for an operation and your covered for when they cut you open, but not when they sew you up? Fine, children, have your broken piece of glass that you want to play with!

And one reason he had to do this was that Bill Clinton opened his big fat vegan mouth, and said Obama should let people keep their crappy insurance, even if screwed up the whole system. You know what? If you're a Democrat, the Clintons are a pre-existing condition.







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Doing It The Neo-Liberal Way

Steve M. reviews those perceived failures which at one time or another has been cited as Obama's "Katrina"  (New Orleans Superdome, from time.com) or that it should be, or that it could be.  They are, in the order he presented them:

Benghazi; IRS; sexual assault in the military; Hurricane Sandy; Hurricane Isaac; Washington, D.C. power outage; MF Global Financial collapse; S&P downgrade; flooding in Nebraska City, Nebraska; Alabama tornado; "CableGate" (from WikiLeaks); BP oil spill; unemployment; Haiti; the Undiebomber; Fort Hood; the stimulus; Georgia flooding; swine flu epidemic; failure to create jobs; General Motors; ice storm in Kentucky.

Digby, who like S.M. is thus unimpressed that the Obamacare rollout is the newest Katrina, comments

The reason Bush was tarred with his Katrina response is because he acted like he didn't give a damn. And it came out of a long series of problems in Iraq and after revelations that his administration had blown off warnings about 9/11. People can say a lot of things about the Obamacare rollout but I don't think anyone can say that the president doesn't give a damn and isn't trying to fix the problems.

But of course the media (under the influence of Republican ref-working) will try to tag him with his own Katrina. As you can see, they've been trying since he came into office. Just as they spent decades trying to find a Democratic Watergate --- and finally just created one out of whole cloth with Whitewater --- they will try to even out Bush's debacle. The media always wants to be above partisanship and tries desperately to find ways to prove they aren't. They called Bush out on Katrina and so feel compelled to find a corollary with Obama.They'll keep doing it until something sticks --- or he is out of office. But don't kid yourself. Some Democrat, whether Obama or a successor, will have to pay a price for Bush's incompetence. It's in the Village bylaws.

But what S.M. finds most egregious is labeling as "Obama's Katrina" an alleged failure of Senator Obama (before B.O. was even elected president).  Mickey Kaus had written

A friend emails: "Obama's KATRINA. A little dramatic?"  Maybe.  Obama's record on "affordable housing," as described in the Globe story, isn't a case of gross ineptitude in a catastrophic regional emergency. It's not even a symbol of endemic governmental dysfunction. (Although: Is there a bigger Petri dish for corrupt incompetence than the "public-private partnership"? Think cable TV franchises.) But the Globe account does seem to capture what's most likely to be wrong with an Obama administration.  After all, Obama's career has been unusually limited for a presidential contender. Housing and "community development" has been a big part of it. 

Housing and community development would not be, could not be, a failure of the Administration on a par with flooding in Nebraska (or Georgia or Kentucky or anywhere).  Nor would public-private partnership ever be cited as a "Petri dish for corrupt incompetence."

But it should be, with a test case of public-private partnership playing out before our eyes. On Thursday, the President conceded "There is no doubt that our failure to roll out the ACA smoothly has put a burden on Democrats, whether they're running or not, because they stood up and supported this effort through thick and thin and, you know, I feel deeply responsible for making it harder for them rather than easier for them."  (Not so responsible, however, that he bothered to support Barbara Buono, Chris Christie's opponent.) The President unequivocally declared  "we fumbled the rollout of this health care law."

The Administration did do a lousy job presenting it its health care website, though initial difficulties with tech rollouts are not unprecedented.  But while it is responsible for coordination of the players involved in healthcare.gov, it was unnecessary for Obama to hold the federal government fully accountable.  Back in mid-October, Wonkblog's Lydia DePillis wrote

Over the past few weeks, if you've been paying attention at all to the unfolding disaster of people trying and failing to sign up for Obamacare online, one name keeps coming up: CGI Federal, the IT contractor that has orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov Web site. By most accounts, it's been a complete train wreck, for reasons both technical and bureaucratic. 

Good of her to notice- few journalists have-not been coming up.  And neither has the media bothered to explain the role of the private sector in partnering with the public sector in what is has been perceived as a wholly governmental screw-up. Ask 100 Americans who created and maintains the website and a vast majority will finger Obama, the federal government, the government, the Democrats, or the like.  Few realize that government contractors- the private sector- have created and maintained the website.
but the name CGI has

Barack Obama plans to keep it that way. Keeping the American people in the dark has been a hallmark of his Administration and there is little reason to reverse course now, especially when it would entail casting doubt on corporate America.  Further,

CGI Federal Inc, the company that created large parts of the error-plagued ObamaCare exchange website, which it says it is scrambling to fix, has recently been awarded several other government contracts.

Since the ObamaCare exchange website launched on Oct. 1, government officials have signed at least five different agreements with CGI totaling $7 million, according to USASpending.gov, a government website that lists government contracts. The contracts were for computer and software development at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

One contract, for instance, was signed Oct. 19 by Department of Commerce officials that gives CGI Federal $266,164 to provide "IT and Telecom Systems Development" for the Patent Office.

The public-private partnership, as applied to housing, health care, or anything else, has not become Obama's "Katrina" and the deaths of 1,000+ Americans cannot be attributed to it.    But as Kaus notes 

The Obama administration has pioneered a new path to corporatism : Screw up a government initiative so much you have to call in the big boys from the industry to fix it. … You think the White House owes the large insurers now that they’ve dispatched their experts to save healthcare.gov? It’s easy to think of dozens of situations in the next three years–assuming Obamacare survives–where Obama’s regulators will have to choose between more competition and cozier big-firm oligopolies. The first benefits consumers. The second benefits insurance company profits.

The government is calling in the big boys from the industry to fix what the industry fouled up.  The Affordable Care Act will survive, embedded forever as an initiative of a Democratic administration.  But the circumstances under which it will are uncertain, and the collaboration between the public and the private sectors has played a major, largely unexamined, role.


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Protecting Citizens From The Truth

In a 2008 campaign speech, Senator Obama famously declared "I'll make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people's business. No more secrecy. That is a commitment that I make to you as president."  Rhetorically, President Obama has emphasized the importance of transparency and on June 13 of this year (video, below) acknowledged "But the mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret doesn't mean you should always use it." He promised "I will also hold myself as President to a new standard of openness and transparency."








Or maybe not.  Commondreams.org reports

If the U.S. gets its way, the world will never know the details of top-level discussions between George W. Bush and Tony Blair that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

An exclusive report released Thursday by The Independent reveals that the White House and U.S. State Department have launched a fierce battle against the release of a four-year government-ordered investigation into the lead-up and aftermath of British participation in a war now widely viewed in the UK as a catastrophe.

The inquiry, led by Sir John Chilcot, is believed to take aim at the official version of events, including misrepresentation of Iraq intelligence, as well as questions about whether former British Prime Minister Tony Blair engaged in secret negotiations with the Bush administration while lying to the British people.

Yet, the U.S. government is forbidding the release of communications between Blair and Bush in the lead-up to the war, declaring it classified information and pressuring British Prime Minister David Cameron to wipe this information from the report.

The Independent reports that the hidden documents "are said to provide crucial evidence for already-written passages that are highly critical of the covert way in which Mr Blair committed British troops to the US-led invasion."

The paper goes on to quote a top-level diplomat, who declared, “The US are highly possessive when documents relate to the presence of the President or anyone close to him... this is not Tony Blair’s or the UK Government’s property to disclose.”

There are signs that the British government is poised to cave to U.S. pressure, in a bid to protect the 'special' relationship between the two countries.

The U.S. government position is designed to protect Bush Administration officials- the same gang Senator Obama criticized while pleading for the votes of Democrats in primaries, and for Democrats and independents in the general election.  But no matter. Now he is President and has been enthusiastic about extending the national security state.  A cynical Digby comments "If President Obama thinks that doing this will protect him from similar revelations when a Republican president takes over he's delusional. They don't play by the same rules as anyone who observed the Ken Starr Circus should understand."

No, they don't.  The only thing which will protect Obama and his henchmen, if a Repub is elected President, is that he or she (oh heck, he) will want to go beyond even where the current president has taken us. And so yet again, President Obama is paving the way for a resurgence of conservatism in America.




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Bad. Worse Than Rather. Different Than Rather.


I'm disappointed in Will Bunch (Philadelphia) Daily News reporter and Attytood blogger.  Not because, with characteristic self-effacement, he writes of the butcher job CBS' 60 Minutes did on its Benghazi report

I'm a journalist, not an activist, and I speak only for myself. I will not watch "60 Minutes," nor buy any product that advertises on the show, until a thorough independent investigation is launched. I may be alone on this (in which case it would be the most ineffective boycott in history!) but I hope that either a) others who are activists pick up the torch or b) CBS quickly reverses course, does the right thing and renders this all moot. There is one quality above all others that defines good journalism, and that is utter fearlessness when it comes to going after the truth.

Bunch decries "the reporting process that caused (Lara) Logan and '60 Minutes' to believe the contractor Dylan Davies for a year, when his story was disproved, including by CBS' own journalists and FBI sources, almost immediately."  But he goes on to contend

CBS has shown in the past it knows how to do the right thing -- because it did exactly that in 2004, when it based  a report on then-President Bush's National Guard record upon phony memos. That time, the network allowed an extensive independent investigation and the responsible parties were fired or suffered career consequences. Nine years later, viewers should expect nothing less with this Benghazi hoax that's been perpetrated on the public. Instead, the network's dismissive and half-assed response has been an insult to all of us. So now what?

This would be an unfortunate application of the moral equivalence principle- if the claim actually were true. CBS, though, showed in the Dan Rather/(producer) Mary Mapes story about George W. Bush's National Guard record not that it could do the right thing but that it would act out of sheer cowardice.   In April, 2012 Texas Monthly's Joe Hagan wrote in an extensive piece entitled "Dan Rather Was Right About George W. Bush"

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn't exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents were forgeries - and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the source of them - tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, "I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled."

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began "before I started any outreach" to the press. He added that Bush himself didn't learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn't show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as "old news."

In any case, MacDougald's arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, "It's ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it's really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn't seem as though they would hold up."

Nevertheless, the controversy exploded in the press, catalyzed by a report in the Washington Post that aggregated all the criticism from the blogosphere and laid it at the doorstep of Rather and CBS. Bartlett coordinated with several former Guardsmen, including Killian's son, to follow suit and attack the CBS report.

Rather was forced to respond, giving newspaper interviews defending the report and eventually addressing the controversy directly on the evening news, offering up new interviews and evidence meant to buttress his initial claims (most famously, he interviewed Killian's former secretary, who said the content of the memos was accurate but the memos themselves were fake).

This excerpt is from a well-researched, thorough article- not a quickie blog post- which laboriously traces the episode from the 1988 presidential campaign of GWB's father to Rather's lingering, justified bitterness in 2009 about the dismissal in 2007 of his lawsuit against Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and CBS president Les Moonves.

Writing two-and-a-half years after the 60 Minutes report during the presidential campaign of 2004, Hagan has it right.   As he summarizes it, Bush was charged with having "received preferential treatment to enter the National Guard in 1968 in order to avoid the Vietnam draft and that he had then shirked his duty without repercussion."  Once a Republican attorney declared them to have (Hagan's words) "used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn't exist on typewriters of the early seventies," both the memoranda and the story itself- despite corroborating evidence- were assumed to be bogus.  Oops! That same lawyer admitted four years later that he was wrong, that typewriters of that time did have both the superscript and proportional spacing characterizing the memoranda.

By then, the storyline of  Rather as dupe or Democratic Party operative was firmly entrenched in the mind of the public, including that of Bunch, who is unaware that the network's investigation was inclusive.  (Rather was forced out and Mapes and three other producers fired because they had not confirmed their report.) The media, for any number of reasons, decided not to reconsider the incident.

And Dan Rather, arguably the best television reporter of his time, is still treated by CBS as persona non grata.   He has been read out of CBS' coverage of the 50-year anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination even though, as the UK's Daily Mail recalls

CBS radio went with his report that Kennedy was dead - based not on official confirmation but his phone conversations with men who identified themselves as a doctor and priest at the hospital where Kennedy was taken, and a colleague's conversation with the hospital's chief of staff.

Days later, Rather was among the first people to see film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder and he later described it live on CBS, reading from a spiral notebook what it captured of the president and first lady at the moment of impact.

Promoting its special to air November 16, CBS announced "viewers are in the moment with legendary anchor Walter Cronkite and journalism's iconic reporters: Charles Collingwood, Harry Reasoner, Charles Kuralt and Mike Wallace." They all are dead. CBS wishes Rather were, too.

Given Lara Logan's enthusiastic anti-Islamist agenda, the network might be suspicious why no one was able to confirm in a year that Dylan Davies' story was false, especially because the Washington Post determined it within a few days after the report.  As of now, Logan remains a CBS reporter, probably primarily because there lacks, unlike in the instance of Dan Rather, an organized effort to force the corporation to fire her. Unfortunately, there might be another, perhaps even worse, reason:

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Cuddly Egomaniac


In his article in New York magazine this past summer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells gets a lot right about Chris Christie, whom many media figures (not only prematurely) already have crowned the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.   He explains, for instance,

Politics, everywhere, is a consequence of geography, but with Christie the effect is more pronounced than with most. New Jersey is a very specific place, with its desolate cities and fortified suburbs and an extreme economic privilege that is both widespread and barely acknowledged. Christie holds conventionally conservative positions on many issues—he’s against gay marriage, pro-life, opposed to government programs for the poor and supportive of cutting taxes on businesses and the rich—and can voice anti-elitist grievances as sharply as any leader on the right. But his anger is directed at different targets and serves a different politics—more cosmopolitan, less alienated, less stringently individualistic; he offers an alternate idea of what conservatism might have looked like during the Obama years, had it been fed by the frustrations of the suburban middle class rather than those of the suspicious, disempowered fringe. With characteristic humility, Christie has spent his summer on the campaign trail offering himself, and his state, as a national ideal.

He knows also New Jersey

has 565 municipalities, most of them small enough to sustain the illusion of classlessness. This proliferation of tiny fiefdoms—distinct, politically isolated—is a quirk of the state’s political history and is kept in place by its system of taxation. New Jersey’s state income tax is the lowest of the 43 states that have an income tax, and its local property taxes are the highest in the nation. (One consequence is that the state taxes fall more heavily on the rich and the local taxes on the lower middle class, and so as Christie has vetoed attempts to reinstate a millionaire’s tax, cut business taxes, and severely diminished a program for property-tax relief, he has shifted the tax burden downward.) The promise of this system is that resources can be kept close to home, where they will be plentiful, and used to build little utopias, and often this has actually happened: The state is filled with superlative school systems.

Because power is concentrated locally, anger can be, too. One Democratic pollster who ran focus groups in the state during the recession told me he’d found less rage than he expected at banks and plutocrats and more directed locally at the schoolteachers and cops whose pensions drove local property taxes higher. “I had one guy in a focus group go on a rant about the pension his father, who was a retired cop, got from the town, that the pension was way too generous,” the pollster told me. “His father.”

This (lack of) generosity of spirit characterizes Christie himself, who once compared students to "drug mules," which unfortunately proved to be a popular remark in a state in which most parents were convinced he couldn't possibly be talking about their own children.   Christie is also emblematic of a state which, Wallace-Wells notes, has both major "class cleavages" but whose "iconography.. is the site of working-class aspiration."  That allows many residents to relate favorably to a guy who claims he is an average Joe from the depressed city of Newark, but who moved out at age 5 with his parents to what has become a wealthy suburb.

W-W fails paints a disturbingly inaccurate picture of the response of people most affected by Hurricane Sandy when he writes

I found myself talking about the shore with a ­Christie-endorsing union official, Greg Lalevee. He has been going to the shore ever since he was a little kid, he and his cousins “stuffed into bungalows” by his grandparents. But what moved Lalevee, when he visited the shore after the storm, was the devastation of the mansions in Mantoloking. When he was a kid, his grandfather would tell the grandkids silly, made-up stories about the rich people who lived in those houses. “You knew coming from a working-class family that your family was never going to own one,” Lalevee said. But still they were something to dream about. Now they were off their foundations, split in two. “It’s very hard not to get emotional about it.”

What Sandy did for Christie was to reveal him as an unexpectedly moving ­middle-class sentimentalist. A few days after the storm, flying over the damage by helicopter, Christie had pointed out the “dumpy little house” he’d crammed into with “like, twelve guys”; he also lamented the loss of a favorite sausage-and-pepper stand. At an event in Highlands last month, a local school superintendent turned to Christie and said, “You’ve been here so much, we’re going to make you a volunteer fireman,” which was hyperbole, but not by much. Every time he could, he emphasized the people who were still homeless, the work that remains to be done. “I know how much this means to you,” Christie said a few days later. “It means that much to me.”

The residents of the Jersey shore slammed by Sandy, however, are far less sentimental about the governor than the writer or Lalevee whom, one notices upon a close read, goes to the shore and visited it after the hurricane.  If he were living there, he might have reacted as did a resident of Union Beach, a woman with the magnificent name of Andrea Kassimatis.  She told Chris Hayes on All In that Christie's show of concern about the hurricane's victims is

very frustrating to me. It almost disgusts me in a sense, because of the fact that when he brags about all the people that are back in their houses, he neglects that the people broke the bank. They tapped into their 401(k)s, their retirement. They now have to work an additional 10, 15, 20 years to pay off the loans that bring them back into those houses.

Additionally, Kassimatis stated

We`re still waiting (for) our RREM grants, we were one of the preliminarily accepted for the grant, I filed for the grant an hour after the grant had opened on line, went in for the filing of the paperwork, I took three separate days off to go file the paperwork, sign the documents they requested. Bring the same documents back a second, a third time, sign them over and over, and just you know, haven`t had any movement since beginning of August, end of September.

This program, which provided federal funds to help primary homeowners repair or rebuild, ended in August, though the location of much of the $1.8 billion from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development remains a mystery.

That may be why Kassimatis is not alone among victims to be skeptical of the awesomeness of  Governor Christie.  You probably hadn't heard the news on October 28:

Three-quarters of New Jersey residents severely impacted by superstorm Sandy surveyed in a new poll said that the state’s recovery efforts have forgotten them.

The poll of 683 residents by the Monmouth University Polling Institute tracked residents who were displaced from their homes for at least a month by the Oct. 29 storm. Most of those surveyed were residents of the Jersey Shore counties of Monmouth and Ocean.

The survey conducted over the last month found that 39% of respondents were yet to return home, while 19% planned not to move back. Another 20% reported being displaced for six months.

Among those surveyed, 61% were somewhat or very dissatisfied with the recovery efforts. Only 7% were very satisfied.

“New Jerseyans who were displaced by the storm, even if they are now back in their homes, are significantly more negative than other Garden State residents about the pace and focus of recovery,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Chris Christie is little more than, as Steve M. characterizes him, "a white guy kicking down, with swagger."  I prefer "a big man kicking down, with swagger" because if he were a little man, it would not have the same political affect, especially among the adoring members of the press corps.   Not all of Christie's Greatest Hits have been carefully scripted, for he is not always able to control his temper (video, below).  Shortly before his re-election, S.M. observed Christie has

been playing down the anger in this campaign and playing up the (alleged) cuddliness, but the anger is still there -- but now that he doesn't want to put it in the foreground, the fawning press doesn't want to, either. And Democrats, shamefully, have let him get away with this, rather than goading and needling him on the campaign trail, which, if it didn't lead to any "macaca" moments that would have brought him down this year, might have led to embarrassing video that could have hurt him in a 2016 general election.







Wallace-Wells u intentionally highlights the contrast between the myth and the reality of Christopher J. Christie when the former claims "the storm gave Christie a national spotlight for his bipartisanship."    There is no one more bipartisan than a team player who boasts "I don't think there's anybody in America who thinks my personality is best suited for being Number Two."



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