Similarities

I see that Jim Nicholson is in the news again.

He’s the current Secretary of Veterans Affairs, presiding over an agency he was tasked to manage but which he has instead turned into a turkey farm and paycheck source for otherwise-unemployable GOP party hacks — just as Michael Brown destroyed FEMA.

If you’re wondering about Nicholson’s credentials, here they are from Wikipedia:

Nicholson has never held elected office, but has long been active in the Republican Party. In January 1986, he was elected committeeman from Colorado for the Republican National Committee (RNC). In 1993, he was elected Vice-Chairman of the RNC, and was the “surprise pick”[2] for GOP national chairman in January 1997. He served in that role through the 2000 presidential election.

Between 2001 and his appointment as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, he served as United States Ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican).

Nicholson’s department is currently under scrutiny as a result of revelations pertaining to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal.

Hmmmm. Kinda reminiscent of that famous College Republican president of the 1980s, the guy who revitalized the group with his innovative dirty tricks methodologies. You know the guy — Jack Abramoff.

Why I Call Them “The GOP/Media Complex”, Part 2343295

On the May 27th edition of This Week on ABC, Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein referred to an unnamed recent “detailed” poll on national security from an unnamed new “think tank” that showed that Americans “still trusted Republicans more to keep the country safe on most questions”.

Too bad he didn’t bother to name the poll, so that he could prove that he didn’t just make it up out of thin air and/or the GOP talking points that pretty much every other reporter with a berth at a major paper are regularly sent.

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, we find a recent Rasmussen Reports tracking survey that shows that Americans actually trusted Democrats more to protect the country — the exact opposite of what Brownstein’s invisible “detailed” poll claimed. (And Rasmussen is a Republican pollster.)

Gee, Ron, most of us gave up our imaginary friends well before we hit puberty. But now, to go along with your unnamed sources that spew nonsense, you have to give us unnamed polls spewing nonsense as well. How convenient.

[UPDATE:  If you want yet another example from the LAT of how the GOP/Media Complex works, Nancy Cleeland, who is leaving the Los Angeles Times, explains how the paper’s conservative-coddling editors and owners have trashed a paper that once aspired to national greatness.]