The Party of Slime

There is abundant evidence that the republican establishment is already in desperate flailing mode, a la their historical Swift-Boat and other despicable trickeries. It is essential that enlightened politically-attuned sorts have this in mind and make every effort to counter the corporate-republican-media's attempts to uncritically disseminate this total crap. Of course it is cutting most of them, e.g., Russert, Matthews, Blitzer, Broder, Friedmann, way more slack than they deserve to imply they are doing this without malice aforethought. They've been sucking at the teat so long now that anything resembling actual critical thinking or independence of opinion is beyond their ken. Never mind actually playing the role of a proper journalist.

Sadly, these folks still are accorded big-time attention in the national press.

Shame on them.

Shame on us.

Digby has a great post on just one of the recent foul-plays, involving our old resigned-in-shame mephistopheles. This is a perfect example of where the pushback is needed, both in terms of fighting the murmur and defying the media via LTTE and etc.

Karl Rove is smiling this morning. Wolf Blitzer just used a clip from Rove's appearance on C-SPAN last week in which he said that Barack Obama looked weak because he failed to confront Hillary Clinton on the fact that she and her husband could release all their records with a phone call and they refuse.

We've been over this. He's a liar and he's simply tickling an ear worm they developed four years ago when they accused John Kerry of not "releasing his records." The claim is bullshit, and FactCheck.org has the explanation right here. The whole phony issue (which Tim Russert happily ran with on the previous debate) is a manufactured GOP smear featured prominently on the RNC website.

But notice how Rove does it. He not only makes the Clintons look they're hiding something, he does it by claiming that Obama is weak. It's a twofer.

Naturally, neither Blitzer, Bash, Malveaux or Crowley ("the best political team on television") bothered to correct Rove's facts. They didn't have time what with all the sophisticated "well, Obama needed to hit it out of the park but he couldn't get it over the goal line and failed to score from mid court like he needed to," analysis. Rove got exactly what he wanted: if you saw that whole segment you came away with the impression that Obama's a wimp and Hillary's corrupt. Match point!

The Republicans are already fully engaged in the destruction of all three of the top Democratic candidates and the media are helping them as usual. One would think that the very fluid, close, unprecedented open primary on the Republican side, where the party is threatening to fracture along religious and regional lines and the personalities are outsized and eccentric, would be far more exciting to cover right now. But the nearly obsessive coverage of Clinton vs Obama shows that they are once again in thrall to the Village agenda. (Talk about a couple of interlopers threatening to trash the place -- why neither one of the front runners are even white men! Mercy!)