Needlenose

Matt Yglesias caught this bit of double-talk about the Rod Blagojevich indictments coming from the Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray in an online chat yesterday:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

Seeing Murray’s eagerness to tolerate phony claims of corruption in the hopes they will prove “useful” in reporting on a hoped-for presidential scandal later, I immediately flashed back to her comments in the summer of 2007, reacting to the actual corruption of a President commuting the sentence of a criminal in his own administration:

Yaawwn. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?

Apparently her enthusiasm for White House scandal depends greatly on which party is occupying the White House.

Via Think Progress, Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com reports on a conversation with perversely influential moron Bill Kristol (whose career arc has taken him from being the “brains behind Dan Quayle” to the impressive dual misadventure of helping bring America both the Iraq war and Sarah Palin):

I asked Kristol about the rumors that he might be leaving the New York Times op-ed page after his contract expires next month. Did he expect to have it renewed?

“I don’t think I’ve had that conversation yet,” he told me.

You don’t think you’ve “had that conversation yet”?  You’d think a lifelong neoconservative would be a more convincing liar.  Bercovici continues:

Okay — but would he like to have it renewed? “I’m ambivalent. It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven’t really focused on it.”

Yep, he’s toast.  Assuming this firing non-renewal comes to pass, though, it would constitute an event so unlikely many observers considered it physically impossible — a conservative actually being held responsible for failure.

From Howard Kurtz’s Monday column for the Washington Post:

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Given her background in ideologically motivated snipe hunts, Miller seems like a perfect fit to join Fox News’ round-the-clock coverage of ACORN’s alleged vote-fraud activities.

If you thought AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier would be a bit chastened by the reaction to his laughably biased criticism of Barack Obama’s VP pick the other day — you know, the article that launched letter-writing protest campaigns by MoveOn.org and Firedoglake — you’d better guess again.

Here he is tonight, spitting reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention:

Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

– Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

– March 2008. “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.“

I know, I know — you’re shocked that a now-famed McCainiac like Fournier found a way to work some out-of-context “praise” for John McCain in reporting on a speech that focused on all the things Clinton and Barack Obama are for, but McCain is against (as Hillary herself repeatedly pointed out during the primaries, even as she competed against Obama). For example, Clinton said:

We need to elect Barack Obama because we need a President who understands that America can’t compete in a global economy by padding the pockets of energy speculators, while ignoring the workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas. We need a President who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in new technologies that will build a green economy.

But those weren’t the words Ron Fournier was interested in — he cared much more about stray remarks from six or eight months ago. Not once in his article, in fact, does Fournier concede that Obama and Clinton favor many of the same policies… in other words, that she might back Obama not merely because he defeated her but because they both sought to achieve the same goals for this country.

Because what Clinton and Obama actually believe isn’t important to Fournier, any more than he gave a flying fig about Clinton’s actual speech last night. His intention is to distract readers from what she said, to disrupt what Clinton and Obama are seeking to achieve by imposing his previously-formed opinions on the event.

In a “news” story. For the once-famously objective Associated Press.

But if Fournier has to take them down, too, along the way, he will. After all, he’s got a candidate to get elected.

(”Ron Fournier’s Notebook” image above by yours truly. Thanks to Ego-Box for the hand-drawn hearts.)

The reactionary media is at it again - now they are criticizing Obama for not giving the GOP Slime Machine a chance to get a picture of him giving a speech with a couple of obvious muslims standing behind him that they can use in their news reports and viral emails spreading the lie that Obama is a Muslim.

But I can see the point of some of the veil-wearing folks excluded by the Obama team - how can it be ‘change’ when the candidate is doing the same careful stage operations as the wrong-wing guy?

Well in the grand guerrilla tradition, rather than just going down the traditional playbook, Team Obama should take a page from the greatest sales guy I ever worked with.

Back in the mists of time, the late 1980s, there was an expression in my industry that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying Blue (IBM).’ I worked for an upstart computer company at the time as a sales engineer, and it was my job, and the job of the sales guy I worked with, to ‘bust in’ to Big Blue territory, financial services companies in the Bay Area.

The sales guy in question was an ex-Blue man, a grizzled veteran who knew the Blue playbook from inside out. We had our first real prospect, a large insurer that was an all-Blue shop. A maverick IT guy was pushing our technology - the CIO spent his weekends and evenings out on the golf course with the IBM sales guy. Impossible situation, right?

Well the sales guy did some sales jiu-jitsu, turning our disadvantages to advantages. It so happened that the insurer’s disk drives were filling up. He coached our champion about what IBM would do - send an analyst out, who would putter around, create a report and recommend a lot of expensive new disk drives. But the Blue secret was that the way IBM setup databases at the time was to never ‘clean out’ deleted data or information, just deactivate it, gradually filling up storage. A simple utility could be written to clear out unused data, so no new disk was required. Our champion, filled with this secret knowledge, went behind the CIO’s back to the President and ‘predicted’ IBM’s and the CIO’s recommendation.

That was one of several examples that our sales guy and the champion used to ’set up’ the CIO. And the result? The CIO was fired for recommending Blue!

In the case of Obama, he would do well to follow that plan. The GOP Slime Machine playbook is pretty predictable at this point. So going back to the picture of Obama with the Muslims - of course they are looking for that photo-op. So why not make it obvious?

He could start out his speech saying “If you will all notice there are two Muslim-Americans behind me. By tomorrow you’ll see this very scene, with everybody but me and these two Americans cropped out of the picture, running non-stop on Fox-News, complete with a running ticker-tape with words like “Al Qaeda, Muslim, Jihad and Islam” streaming underneath. Then, the following day, you’ll see their colleagues on other news channels like CNN & MSNBC start rehashing the same speaking points about how people all think I am Islamic. So the next two days, let’s all play a little game - every time you see this picture, or a Media Pundit say the words Obama and Muslim in the same sentence, send an email or call the station’s ombudsman and ask them why the are running this story? That’s the surest way we can stop this electioneering ‘business as usual.” Or something to that effect.

In this fashion Obama could set the agenda, rather than constantly reacting to the latest reactionary Media Echo Chamber attack.

On a related issue, Green Boy Sr. (dad) had a great suggestion about McCain’s constant whining about Obama not visiting Iraq. If Obama goes to Iraq he is just following the McCain agenda, and will get caught in bad photo ops (ill-fitting flack jacket, troops all around), and get the same orchestrated propaganda tour. However, if he blows off Iraq, and just goes straight to Afghanistan, he would have the opportunity (given the current crop of bad news as A’stan is starting to swirl faster down the drain) of seizing the initiative. “Senator McCain, where are you when Afghanistan is falling apart? Here is where you can find Al Qaeda; here is where you can find the Taliban. And here is where our troops need to be, supporting our ally, not in Iraq where we are unwanted.” Or something to that effect.