Cheaters actually do prosper: the Bush AWOL story

Via Barry Ritholtz, An article from Joe Hagan of The Texas Monthly reviews the Bush AWOL story and “Rathergate,” in which Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes were driven from their jobs and blacklisted for daring to question whether George W. Bush served honorably in the Air National Guard.

While it won’t settle many controversies, it does definitively show how the right-wing attack machine, willing to tell any lie to protect their candidates, successfully shouted down people who tried to tell the truth about the memos used in Dan Rather’s report:

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.\
…
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.”

So the memos could have been real. Yes, Mapes and Rather failed to vet them adequately. But if making that kind of mistake were the criterion for who could work in news, how does that compare to FOX News posting an Onion story as a legitimate news story?

Mahabarb, one of the few sane voices at the time, stands vindicated. The Washington Post, which abused its standing to protect Bush, stands indicted. The right-wing simply does not care if the man they put in the White House is a drunk, a liar, and a coward, as long as he doesn’t raise their taxes. They are willing to kill this country for a dollar.

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The Guilty Flee When No Man Pursueth II: Jon Kyl Attacks Sheriff Dupnik

A point to remember:

Sheriff Dupnik, in his remarks yesterday, didn’t specifically single out right-wing politicians and media figures as being the entities that turned Arizona into “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry”. But we all know full well that it’s not lefties who are the culprits here — hell, a Republican senator has even admitted as much:

A senior Republican senator, speaking anonymously in order to freely discuss the tragedy, told POLITICO that the Giffords shooting should be taken as a “cautionary tale” by Republicans.

“There is a need for some reflection here – what is too far now?” said the senator. “What was too far when Oklahoma City happened is accepted now. There’s been a desensitizing. These town halls and cable TV and talk radio, everybody’s trying to outdo each other.”

Why is this senator speaking anonymously? Because he fears retribution from either his party’s leadership or his party’s base.

Can you imagine Democratic senators like Ben Nelson or Mary Landrieu acting so fearful of their party leadership or their base that they don’t dare go on the record against them? Of course not, because they know they have nothing to fear from their party’s base. The same is not true of Republicans.

In fact, even though Sheriff Dupnik didn’t specifically mention right-wingers as the culprits behind the poisonous Arizona climate, right-wingers are certainly — in classic “the guilty flee when no man pursueth” fashion — reacting as if he did. Some of them want to force him to resign, and hard-right Republican Arizona Senator Jon Kyl has attacked Sheriff Dupnik over his remarks.

As to whether the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, is a right-winger: How many lefties do you know that are Glenn-Beck-style gold and silver bugs? Furthermore, according to the SPLC’s Mark Potok, Loughner got his grammar ideas from right-wing nutjob and Tea Party favorite David Wynn Miller. I think that pretty much settles that question.

Dear NPR: Sucking Up To Republicans Never Works

Dirigo Blue has the goods (h/t Jane).

While The Corporate Media Was Busy Talking About Ginny Thomas’ Bizarre Voice And E-Mails

The following things happened:

— Republicans are ramping up voter-intimidation and suppression efforts, to the point where the Justice Department is now investigating.

— Speaking of Republican efforts at voter suppression, they actually thought Latino voters would be fooled by this ad telling them, in Spanish, not to vote. Ooops. Univision flatly refused to run it, and now the ad is the talk of the Latino community — and not in a way that’s good for the GOP. (One of the ad’s talking points is that the Democrats couldn’t get the DREAM Act passed. Of course, what it doesn’t say is that Republicans opposed the DREAM Act and every single Senate Republican filibustered it when the Democrats brought it to the floor as part of a must-pass defense bill.

— Carly Fiorina showed herself to be so unqualified to be California’s next governor that even FOX’s Chris Wallace lost patience with her inability to hit any of the T-Balls he so helpfully set up for her to hit.

— Income inequality is killing America. Literally.

But you’d never know about this if you got your news solely from network TV, drive-time radio, or web news portals like Yahoo or AOL. Instead, Ginny Thomas’ strange behavior gets headlined.

Mason Bails On Emmer: File This Under “Rat-&@#ers Leaving A Sinking Ship”

This little bit of news is most interesting:

A top consultant who helped Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman win elections says he has left the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.

That would be Tom Mason.

And who is Tom Mason? Let valued FDL commenter (and longtime DFLer) Sara explain:

By the way PW — did you notice that Tom Mason walked out on the Emmer Campaign? I always laugh at the mention of Tom Mason’s name, it reminds me of that fantastic 1990 Wellstone ad, where he taps the BMW in the Boschwitz staff parking area, and says “nice car” — that was Tom Mason’s car. Just the name makes me laugh. For those not into ancient DFL symbols and all — Tom Mason managed Rudy Boschwitz’s campaigns in 84 and 1990 and again when Boschwitz got a return match against Wellstone in 1996 — and he ran Coleman’s campaigns in 2002 and 2008. Mason is the author of the strategy of turning Paul’s Memorial Service against the DFL in 2002 in the wake of the plane crash. Nothing I like more than hearing on MPR that Mason, who was running Emmer’s campaign this year, has decided to sit this one out.

Ah, yes. In other words, Tom Mason is very likely the reason you’re reading this right now.

Let me explain:

Thers Has A Message For All Of Us

It involves courage, cowards, and other things.

And it references To Kill a Mockingbird. Major win.

Sunday Night News Roundup

— Has Netanyahu conned Obama into attacking Iran? Signs are disquieting. As Bibi said in 2001 (transcript here): “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.”

— Speaking of easily-rolled entities, the Washington Post is sickeningly submissive to any and all right-wing intimidation.

— I’m writing a novel online, just because I can.

— And also just because I can, Kitten loves Puppy.

Sign on dotted line

(Via Barry Ritholtz) I don’t usually sign petitions, but one that I decided to sign onto was on financial reform. This should be beyond politics, but it’s going to take a major rising up by the citizenry to make the GOP STFU and legislate. I urge you to sign on to the following petition, which says in part:

Dear Senators Reid and McConnell:

Nineteen months after the most devastating financial crisis since the Great Depression, our financial system remains at risk. Neither the bill passed earlier this year by the House, nor the one currently under consideration in the Senate would have prevented the crisis. Without serious restructuring, they will not prevent a future crisis.

Sound financial markets are the bedrock of a strong economy. Over the last decade, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, our financial sector moved away from core market principles – transparency, competition, free flow of information and the essential discipline of failure – that allowed the US economy to thrive. Restoring the integrity of our financial markets and providing the foundation for economic recovery, requires re-committing to these principles.

Among the signers are people like Bob Reich and Dean Baker, so you know it’s not from industry, but there are a lot of centrists and financial people, too. One of the key names in getting me to sign on is William Black (Associate Prof. of Economics and Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City). From what I have seen, he is an incredibly talented, conscientious, and tenacious guy. If he thinks that this is worth signing, it’s worth signing.

PS: Jane has more on Bill Black here.

The rest of the story on the Tea Partier who threw dollar bills at a Parkinson’s patient

At MercRising, we try to follow stories over the longer term, to gain some understanding of what they really mean, to make corrections where necessary, or to admit error. Southern Beale brought to my attention the following story which helps to advance our understanding of the story about the man at a Tea Party rally who threw dollar bills at a counter-protestor who had Parkinson’s.

The man who berated and tossed dollar bills at a man with Parkinson’s disease during a health care protest last week says he is remorseful and scared.

“I snapped. I absolutely snapped and I can’t explain it any other way,” said Chris Reichert of Victorian Village, in a Dispatch interview.

In his first comments on an incident that went viral across the Internet and was repeatedly played on cable television news shows, Reichert said he is sorry about his confrontation with Robert A. Letcher, 60, of the North Side. Letcher, a former nuclear engineer who suffers from Parkinson’s, was verbally attacked as he sat before anti-health care demonstrators in front of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s district office last week.

“He’s got every right to do what he did and some may say I did too, but what I did was shameful,” Reichert said. “I haven’t slept since that day.”

“I made a donation (to a local Parkinson’s disease group) and that starts the healing process.”…

He said he’s fearful for his family after reading comments about his actions on the Internet.

“I’ve been looking at the web sites,” he said. “People are hunting for me.”…

“That was my first time at any political rally and I’m never going to another one,” Reichert said.

I would predict that people are not hunting for him, and will forget about him in short order. But one value of a follow-up like this is to urge people to calm down and understand that behind the vicious act, there was a human being.

As I commented to Southern Beale, anger is a drug. We have lots of addicts, and lots of dope peddlers on hate radio. (There are some on the left, though thankfully far fewer than there are on the right). Reichert is like the man who gets drunk, wakes up in the morning, and is ashamed of himself. Don’t be too sorry for him until he’s sober for a few years.

Southern Beale’s post is worth reading, because it describes two other examples of Road Rage, but what more aptly be called Right-Rage.

For people who follow history, this is best understood as a political phenomenon. The right usually uses hate as a means of intimidating or killing the opposition. Anyone who followed Honduras last year and this can see how hatred of communists, gays, indigenous people, and the poor is used to mobilize supporters to mass violence. On the left, the Gang of Four and Pol Pot’s people also did this.

Just Keep Diggin’ That Hole, Mitt

Just when you thought you were safe from Willard, he’s tanned, rested, and spewing gibberish in his battle with Tim Pawlenty for the 2012 votes of the Cleon Skousen-Glenn Beck fan base as he attacks President Obama’s eminently sensible decision to scrap the useless and costly Reagan-Bush Star Wars missile shield concept once and for all.

Y’know, it might not be good for the Mittster to draw attention to himself right now, not when the news of the utter health care reform failure of RomneyCare (aka the MaxTax Co-Ops Beta) in his former home state is starting to make it onto the national media’s radar screens.