Ooh-ooh-ooh What An Open Mind Can Do
Please remind me - who was the last Attorney General forced to resign the office more or less for cause? It is indeed a quiz as I have an answer of my own, but am relying solely on memory, none of this cheating with reference works or search-engines!
I sense that it is an event we can expect rather shortly, given at least two senior Republicans already calling for sleazy-Gonzalez' departure. We have as a fat-and-happy populace lazily come around to tolerating stinky corruption, witness our love-affair with The Godfather and such. But maybe we need to revisit The Octopus, The Jungle, It Can't Happen Here, et al, and attend to the numerous more recent documents that starkly demonstrate that we are absolutely in the midst of a constitutional and human-rights crisis. Even what's left of the peanut party cannot allow this to go on endlessly. Their bed is already so full of rotting effluvium that sleep must be impossible.
But the more critical issue is Mr. Rove. He is almost certainly behind this whole business, besides playing a central role in the Plame outing. From what I can tell there is absolutely no question he has committed numerous felonies, yet he apparently continues to possess a security clearance suggesting far better judgement and integrity than he has ever exhibited. Why is he still allowed to be a part of the government that answers to us?
It's still rare, but I'd put good money on the idea that there is an improving trend in mainstream reporters (even famous ones!) finding religion (NO, not that kind) and facing up to and acknowledging their Mainstream Sycophantic Boot-licking Error. It was encouraging this week to have Jay Carney of Time Magazine do some major mea culpa over his former cynicism regarding the Attorney-gate coverage at our favorite Talking Points Memo site. Obviously Carney finally came to refuse or achieve resistance to the koolaid that seems to be the only source of fluid routinely available to right-wing radio and Fox et al aside from the blood of young people from other families not so well off.
And it is certainly fun to read of third-party confirmation:
It's almost too perfect. A mainstream reporter mocks a story a blogger has been working to break, asserting that "it all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!", and that the blogger is "seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist," only to backtrack a few weeks later when the story explodes across the front pages of the major dailies.
If you wanted to force the issue -- and we would be surprised if some MSM-hating critic doesn't -- the episode illustrates perfectly how the Washington press corps ignores the blogosphere at its own peril. But the story, and its implications, are actually far more complicated -- and for journalism, heartening -- than that.
Still, the image is great. While the mocking reporter, Time magazine's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, was busy dumping, via Times Swampland blog, on the story of U.S. Attorneys being fired across the country, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo, and two of his reporters at his offshoot site, TPMuckracker.com, Paul Kiel and Justin Rood, were busy reporting, using a variety of sources that had been largely untapped by the mainstream press.
To be fair, Carney wasn't dismissing the story out of hand, but his snark hardly masked his belief that Marshall & Co. were out on a partisan limb, hyping a story that just wasn't there.
As we now know, there is most definitely some "there, there," and the press has been all over the story for more than a week, discovering that the paper trail that led to the firings leads, on some level, to the White House. Many (including two Republican members of Congress) have called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to step down, and the Democratic controlled Congress is licking its chops to hold hearings and issue subpoenas.
Despite his early misgiving about the story, on March 2 Carney finally came around, saying this his "hat is off" to TalkingPointsMemo and "everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings." And then came the words that bloggers have so longed to hear: "The blogosphere was the engine on this story," Carney wrote, "pulling the Hill and the MSM along...what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire."
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I sense that it is an event we can expect rather shortly, given at least two senior Republicans already calling for sleazy-Gonzalez' departure. We have as a fat-and-happy populace lazily come around to tolerating stinky corruption, witness our love-affair with The Godfather and such. But maybe we need to revisit The Octopus, The Jungle, It Can't Happen Here, et al, and attend to the numerous more recent documents that starkly demonstrate that we are absolutely in the midst of a constitutional and human-rights crisis. Even what's left of the peanut party cannot allow this to go on endlessly. Their bed is already so full of rotting effluvium that sleep must be impossible.
But the more critical issue is Mr. Rove. He is almost certainly behind this whole business, besides playing a central role in the Plame outing. From what I can tell there is absolutely no question he has committed numerous felonies, yet he apparently continues to possess a security clearance suggesting far better judgement and integrity than he has ever exhibited. Why is he still allowed to be a part of the government that answers to us?
It's still rare, but I'd put good money on the idea that there is an improving trend in mainstream reporters (even famous ones!) finding religion (NO, not that kind) and facing up to and acknowledging their Mainstream Sycophantic Boot-licking Error. It was encouraging this week to have Jay Carney of Time Magazine do some major mea culpa over his former cynicism regarding the Attorney-gate coverage at our favorite Talking Points Memo site. Obviously Carney finally came to refuse or achieve resistance to the koolaid that seems to be the only source of fluid routinely available to right-wing radio and Fox et al aside from the blood of young people from other families not so well off.
And it is certainly fun to read of third-party confirmation:
It's almost too perfect. A mainstream reporter mocks a story a blogger has been working to break, asserting that "it all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!", and that the blogger is "seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist," only to backtrack a few weeks later when the story explodes across the front pages of the major dailies.
If you wanted to force the issue -- and we would be surprised if some MSM-hating critic doesn't -- the episode illustrates perfectly how the Washington press corps ignores the blogosphere at its own peril. But the story, and its implications, are actually far more complicated -- and for journalism, heartening -- than that.
Still, the image is great. While the mocking reporter, Time magazine's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, was busy dumping, via Times Swampland blog, on the story of U.S. Attorneys being fired across the country, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo, and two of his reporters at his offshoot site, TPMuckracker.com, Paul Kiel and Justin Rood, were busy reporting, using a variety of sources that had been largely untapped by the mainstream press.
To be fair, Carney wasn't dismissing the story out of hand, but his snark hardly masked his belief that Marshall & Co. were out on a partisan limb, hyping a story that just wasn't there.
As we now know, there is most definitely some "there, there," and the press has been all over the story for more than a week, discovering that the paper trail that led to the firings leads, on some level, to the White House. Many (including two Republican members of Congress) have called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to step down, and the Democratic controlled Congress is licking its chops to hold hearings and issue subpoenas.
Despite his early misgiving about the story, on March 2 Carney finally came around, saying this his "hat is off" to TalkingPointsMemo and "everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings." And then came the words that bloggers have so longed to hear: "The blogosphere was the engine on this story," Carney wrote, "pulling the Hill and the MSM along...what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire."
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:19 PM
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