Anyone who has been active in politics since the prediluvian era of the 1990s can probably remember a time when a central event of every weekday was the arrival on the fax machine of The Hotline, once the Daily Bread of the chattering classes.
You can revisit those days–or, if you are younger, discover them–via a long article at Politico by Keach Hagey that examines The Hotline’s past, present and future in some detail. It certainly does bring back memories:

Howard Mortman, a former columnist and editor at The Hotline, remembers the first time he saw the process — a blinking frenzy of subscribers dialing in by modem, one by one, to get their pre-lunch politics fix.
“We would publish at 11:30, and you could go downstairs and see the lights flicker as people downloaded The Hotline from the telephone bulletin board,” he said. “At that time, in 1995, that was cutting-edge technology.”
Today, The Hotline is still putting out its exhaustive aggregation of cleverly titled political tidbits at 11:30 a.m., though subscribers hit a refresh button instead of a fax number to get it. But the sense of cutting-edge technology and unique content is gone, eclipsed by an exponentially expanding universe of political websites, blogs, Twitter feeds, Google alerts and mobile apps that offer much of what a $15,000 annual office membership to The Hotline offers — but faster and for free.

In effect, Hotline was the first “aggregator,” and as a result was an exceptionally efficient and even cost-effective way to obtain political news at a time when clipping services were the main alternative. And for all of The Hotline‘s gossipy Washington insider attitudes, it did cover campaigns exhaustively, from coast to coast, in a way that was virtually unique at the time.
If you are interested in the process whereby The Hotline has struggled to survive in the online era, or in the cast of media celebrities who got their start there, check out the entire article, with the appropriate grain of salt in recognition of the fact that Politico views itself as a successor institution.
The takeaway for me, though, is the reminder that for all the maddening things about blogs and online political coverage generally, it’s really remarkable how much is now available to anyone, for free, 24-7–material that is shared by the DC commentariat and, well, anybody who cares to use it. In The Hotline’s heyday, its subscribers (concentrated in Washington but scattered around the country) really did represent a separate class with specialized access to information that created and sustained a distinct culture.
If you have money to burn, there are still paywalls you can climb to secure a privileged perch from which to observe American politics, just as you can obviously learn things living and working in Washington or frequenting its real or virtual watering holes that wouldn’t be obvious to others. But we have come a long way. And it’s actually wonderful that the entire hep political world no longer comes to a stop shortly before noon, in some sort of secular Hour of Prayer, in anticipation of The Word rolling off the fax machine.

Anyone interested in making the 2010 (and for that matter, 2012) elections revolve around a comparison of Democratic and Republican plans for dealing with the country’s big challenges should read Ezra Klein’s intereview with Rep. Paul Ryan, published in the Washington Post yesterday.
Ryan, as you may recall, is the principal author of the so-called “Republican Road-Map” document that is an extremely rare GOP outline of an agenda that would be implemented through the federal budget process. That agenda, of course, is focused on tax cuts and spending cuts.
But what makes the interview fascinating is Klein’s eventually successful effort to get Ryan to admit that nothing in his or other Republicans’ plans would involve much of anything designed to deal with the immediate jobs crisis and overall economic slump:

Where I come from, I think certainty and long-term solutions are better. Temporary stuff doesn’t work. These short-term stimulative things like rebates don’t work. They’ll pump up some money in the quarter where they occur. You go right back where you were. These short-term stimuli, which Bush and Obama did, don’t change aggregate demand. And that’s why I think we need more of an investment-led recovery. At this point, given the borrowing costs, stimulus is counterproductive.

Ryan’s ideas for an “investment-led recovery” focus on high-end tax cuts, of course, along with an extraordinary faith in the proposition that a shift to smaller-government policies would provide “certainty” to the private sector and “unlock” capital. If that faith turns out to be misplaced, or takes many years to play out, well, too bad; the really important thing is repealing ObamaCare and the just-enacted financial regulatory package.
Now it’s hardly news when a Republican thinks tax cuts are the answer to every conceivable economic question. But it’s the combination of that dogma with the suddenly-critical demand to reduce federal budget deficits that makes it very difficult for Ryan to pretend Americans can expect anything other than continued high unemployment and sluggish growth under GOP policies. When specifically asked by Klein about the recessionary impact of public-sector layoffs, which directly increase unemployment, Ryan retreated into an argument about the need for state and local governments to deal with “structural deficit” issues. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people need to thrown out of work in order to accomplish a long-range shrinkage of the public sector, which is an end in itself with no relationship to any economic recovery. Ryan also calls for an increase in interest rates, which would impose still more short-term pain.
Now this is especially noteworthy because Ryan is at least willing to essay an intellectually defensible position and connect it to a specific agenda. Many Republicans (including would-be House Speaker John Boehner) have backed away from Ryan’s “Road Map” because they understand it includes politically toxic proposals like another run at partial-privatization of Social Security, and a “voucherization” of Medicare. So your standard-brand conservative fulminating for tax cuts and an immediate balancing of the federal budget relies far more than Ryan on vague and magical thinking about the impact on the economy of Republican rule, and offers even less in the way of steps to deal with the economic problems Americans face right now.
So Ryan’s “thinking” is about as good as it gets in the GOP ranks. Democrats definitely need to make voters impatient for strong action on the jobs crisis abundantly aware that Republicans don’t intend to move a muscle, even as they rush to shower tax benefits on the few Americans who are feeling no pain.

In an interesting argument over at OpenLeft about the biggest mistake recently made by Democrats, Chris Bowers suggests that fighting Republican efforts to gut the right to filibuster back during the “nuclear option” debate of 2005 had truly fateful consequences:

[N]ot allowing Republicans to destroy the filibuster back in 2005 is the biggest mistake made by not only President Obama, but by the Democratic trifecta as a whole (and, I admit, my biggest mistake too). This would have resulted in a wide swatch of changes, including a larger stimulus, the Employee Free Choice Act, a better health bill (in all likelihood, one with a public option, and completed in December), an actual climate / energy bill, a second stimulus, and more. If Democrats had tacked on other changes to Senate rules that sped up the process, such as doing away with unanimous consent, ending debating time after cloture is achieved on nominations, eliminating the two days between filing for cloture and voting on cloture, and restricting quorum calls, then virtually every judicial and administration vacancy would already be filled, as well.

I agree with the general argument that Democrats who got all nostalgic about Senate traditions in 2005 when Republicans were threatening to eliminate filibusters against judicial nominations were not thinking strategically. In particular, those who cheered the Schoolhouse Rock-inspired “Phil A. Buster” ads run by the progressive Alliance for Justice would now probably cringe at the memory.
But for the record, it’s important to remember what was actually going on in 2005, in the Republican effort to force Senate floor votes on Bush judicial nominations. The GOP argument was not against filibusters tout court, but against judicial filibusters. And their argument was that such filibusters were unconstitutional on grounds that they violated the provisions requiring Senate advice and consent for judicial nominations. Indeed, the “nuclear option” they threatened was simply a ruling by the vice president, as presiding officer of the Senate, that Rule XXII governing the terms for ending debate was unconstitutional with respect to judicial nominations. Ending filibusters altogether was never on the table, barring some see-you-and-raise-you Democratic tactic of offering Bush his judges in exchange for a more radical step towards majority rule in the Senate, which was never seriously contemplated.
Sure, Republicans have had some fun over the last couple of years quoting Democrats who made pro-filibuster comments in 2005, and it’s true that some Democrats didn’t try very hard back then to make the specific case for judicial filibusters (a case that could have been made on grounds that lifetime appointments to the federal bench require greater Senate scrutiny than the routine legislation that Republicans now routinely block, creating a virtual 60-vote requirement for Senate action). But Democrats need not spend too much time regretting the failure to take advantage of an opportunity that never really existed in 2005.

Greg Sargent’s ‘Plum Line’ post, “GOP blocks small business bill. Who will get the blame?” at the WaPo should be required reading for all Dem elected officials, their staffers and campaign workers. Here’s what Sargent has to say about how important legislative votes are too often reported and received:

…No matter how many times Dems scream about GOP obstructionism, the jury is out on whether Republicans will take any of the blame for its consequences. Dems run the place, and the public may tune out any argument over Senate procedure as so much Beltway white noise.
The latest: In the Senate today, Republicans blocked a bill to create a $30 billion fund to enable community banks to boost lending to small businesses. Republicans decried the move as another bailout, and it’s now unlikely that it will pass before Congress goes home for vacation in August, with little in the way of jobs bills under its belt.
So how will this story play?…

I won’t quote the graph from the AP story Sargent provides as exhibit “A.” You’ve seen it before in many previous incarnations. The general gist is that ‘gee wiz, those ineffectual Democrats failed to pass something again,’ giving the Republicans a largely free ride. The rest of the AP story Sargent didn’t quote prattles on in similar vein, at one point attempting to make Mitch McConnell sound like the voice of reason and humanitarian concern. Yet another classic example of lazy, gullible or GOP-biased reportage. As Sargent asks,

…Is this how the story will be understood by the American people? Very possible…Republicans claimed Dems blocked votes on the amendments they wanted. Dems countered that they agreed to votes on the GOP amendments, only to have the GOP demand more votes. Get what’s happening here? The larger story is all getting subsumed in a bunch of Beltway white noise.

Call it the ‘White Noise Strategy.” The GOP has been deploying it with impressive results for decades. Sargent quotes a statement from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the usual complaint about the Republicans playing politics and how the President will not be distracted — all well and good.
But what’s really needed here is a day of Democratic outrage, making the Republicans eat their numerous statements about small business being ‘the engine of job-creation.’ It should be a day when all Democratic elected officials, from city council members to Obama, get loud on one single message and refuse to talk about anything else. And that message should be fiercely-stated outrage, including displays of raw anger in press conferences, interviews, talk shows and statements, at denying small businesses the help they need to start hiring again. That would be a day that resonates with millions of small business women and men, as well as the unemployed and everyone who has the brains to understand that this is the kind of stimulus that makes sense. Then when October rolls around, remind them again and again about the day of outrage in political ads and a YouTube email campaign.
Small business job-creation is a hugely-important priority for economic recovery. The Republicans have squashed it for now. But there is a choice: Let the white noise prevail again — or get fierce.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galson is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In a recent post, Jonathan Chait rightly calls our attention to the Pew survey released July 16 that showed how voters rate political parties’ ideologies. While I agree with Chait’s interpretation of the data he cites, I want to underscore the significance of some other information in the survey–namely, where voters identify themselves in relation to the parties.
On the whole, 58 percent of voters see Democrats as liberal or very liberal, while 56 percent see Republicans as conservative or very conservative; no surprise there. But voters now place themselves much closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party on this left-right continuum. Indeed, the ideological gap between the Democratic Party and the mean voter is about three times as large as the separation between that voter and the Republican Party. And, startlingly, the electorate places itself a bit closer to the Tea Party movement (which is well to the right of the Republican Party) than to the Democratic Party. All this represents a major shift from five years ago, when mean voters placed themselves exactly halfway between their ideological perceptions of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The Pew survey also shows that Democrats are far more ideologically diverse than Republicans. Twenty-four percent of Democrats describe themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 5 percent of Republicans call themselves liberal or very liberal. Conversely, 65 percent of Republicans think of themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 42 percent of Democrats self-identify as liberal or very liberal. This helps explain why 83 percent of Republicans see the Democratic Party as more liberal than they themselves are–while only 60 percent of Democrats place the Republican Party to the right of where they place themselves.
Shifts among Independents are especially notable. A Pew survey in June 2005 found that Independents considered the Republican Party to be twice as distant from them ideologically as the Democratic Party. Today, Independents see the Democratic Party as three times farther away than the Republican Party. In 2005, 51 percent of Independents thought that the Republican Party was more conservative than they themselves were, versus only 36 percent who thought that the Democratic Party was more liberal. Today, 56 percent of Independents see the Democratic Party as more liberal than they themselves are, compared to only 39 percent who see the Republican Party as more conservative.
In May 2009, after Obama had taken office and the broad political debate had shifted away from social issues and national security toward the economy and federal regulation, Pew found that Independents had begun to move toward the Republican Party. This month’s survey suggests a continuation of this trend in Obama’s second year.
Three politically relevant conclusions follow from these data. First, Democrats’ greater diversity means that party leaders are bound to have more trouble managing their coalition than the Republicans will theirs. Second, the Independents who helped Democrats score a notable success in the 2006 midterm elections may well do the same for Republicans in 2010.
The third conclusion to be drawn from the poll is that, whether Democrats lose control of the Congress or remain in power with much narrower majorities, Obama’s challenge will resemble the one Bill Clinton faced after 1994–namely, reestablishing his standing among those voters outside of the Democratic base whose support spells the difference between retaining and losing a national majority. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Obama should do that the way Clinton did, by championing small-bore issues–such as school uniforms–designed to send reassuring messages to the electorate. But I am suggesting that he should bring comparable focus and clarity to the task of broadening his appeal beyond his core supporters… and organize his White House to maximize the chances that he can accomplish that task.

At CQ today, Roll Call columnist and election handicapper Stu Rothenberg has a piece today complaining about Democrats who are arguing that it was inevitable all along that they’d have a bad midterm outcome, regardless of the economy or other objective developments.
I’m not sure which “Democrats” Rothenberg’s talking about, since the only person he cites who believes the economy is irrelevant to the midterms is Joe Scarborough.
But while I don’t personally know anyone who thinks the economy isn’t going to be a drag on Democratic performance, in burning down this straw man, Rothenberg goes too far in dismissing structural factors that were going to make 2010 far more difficult for Democrats than 2008 no matter what Barack Obama did or didn’t do.
Since Rothenberg’s entire argument is framed in terms of House seats Democrats are likely to lose, the obvious structural factor to keep in mind is the historic tendency of the party controlling the White House to lose House seats in midterms. Stu acknowledges that, but points out that the level of losses varies (of course it does) and also points to 1998 and 2002 as years the ancient rule of midterm losses didn’t apply. That’s fine, though anyone citing those two years as relevant should probably note that the former year came in the midst of the first impeachment of a president since 1867, while the latter year came after the first attack on the continental United States since 1814. At any rate, while most Democrats early in the Obama presidency hoped the party would overcome the heavy weight of history, few predicted it as likely.
But the second structural factor is one that Rothenberg does not mention at all: the very different demographic composition of midterm versus presidential electorates, which is especially important this year given the high correlation of the 2008 vote with age (at least among white voters), and the heavy shift towards older voters in midterms. As I like to say, this means that Democrats were in trouble for the midterms the very day after the 2008 elections. That doesn’t mean everything that happened since doesn’t matter, by any means, but it does suggest pessimism about 2010 and a corresponding optimism about 2012, when the 2008 turnout patterns are likely to reemerge or even intensify.
Finally, in this kind of discussion of House “gains” and “losses,” it’s important to remember that the entire U.S. House of Representatives is up for reelection every two years. So the position of the two parties nationally is reflected by the absolute results, not which party “gains” or “loses” seats from the prior election. If Democrats hang onto control of the House, it’s a Democratic victory (albeit a much smaller one than in 2008) because they will have won a majority of seats (and presumably a majority of votes for the House nationally), and it’s not a Republican victory but instead a smaller defeat. House gains or losses are relevant to trends, of course, but shouldn’t dictate characterization of specific election results.
In other words, Rothenberg’s effort to anticipate and preempt Democratic spin about the November elections is all well and good, but there a lot of questionable assumptions about this election that need to be examined–most definitely the idea that any significant Republican gains mean the country has fundamentally changed its mind since 2008. That’s a “spin” that Republicans are already avidly promoting every day.

It’s hardly news that state and local governments around the country are laying off workers and reducing services in the current economic and fiscal climate. But putting aside services for a moment, the sheer impact of public-sector job layoffs is becoming pretty alarming:

Cash-strapped cities and counties have been cutting jobs to cope with massive budget shortfalls — and that tally could edge up to nearly 500,000 if Congress doesn’t step up to help.
Local governments are looking to eliminate 8.6% of their total full-time equivalent positions by 2012, according to a new survey released Tuesday by the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and United States Conference of Mayors.
“Local governments across the country are now facing the combined impact of decreased tax revenues, a falloff in state and federal aid and increased demand for social services,” the report said. “In this current climate of fiscal distress, local governments are forced to eliminate both jobs and services.”

That’s just local governments, mind you, not the states who are themselves facing major layoffs.
Now many conservatives would celebrate this news on grounds that eliminating some of the parasites who work for government will somehow, someway, free up resources for the private sector. I’ve never understood exactly how that’s supposed to work, but as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s a really bad time to experiment with efforts to counter-act a recession by increasing unemployment:

Conservatives have largely convinced themselves that public servants are such vile and overpaid monsters that anything that forces layoffs is a good thing and the moderates in Congress seem scared of their own shadows so nothing will be done. But economically speaking, the time for local governments to try to trim the fat is when unemployment is low and your laid-off librarian, ambulance driver, or guy who keeps the park clean can get a new job where his or her skills will plausibly be more optimally allocated. But guess what produces less social welfare than driving a bus? Sitting at home being unemployed. And so it goes down the line. Dumping people into a depressed labor market all-but-guarantees an increase in idleness along with a drop in revenue for local retailers that will lead to more idleness and waste.

Higher unemployment is simply bad. Deliberately promoting it is worse.

The exposure of the dishonest manipulation of videos first released on Andrew Breitbart’s websites has been widely and properly applauded as a major setback for the hard-right. In the future it is extremely unlikely that the mainstream media will again blindly publicize heavily edited video clips without demanding to see the complete video behind them. Even conservative commentators – who were deeply humiliated by having to publically apologize for having committed legally actionable defamation of character on national TV – will hesitate before trusting Breitbart’s propaganda materials again.

But Democrats should have absolutely no illusions that this setback will lead to any overall moderation of the fierce and bitter attacks that have been directed at Obama and the Democratic Party since last spring. Quite the contrary, Dems should seriously prepare for the possibility that even more intense and dangerous tactics will now be employed.

The reason is that the deliberate editing of video to create a false impression is actually just one specific tactic in a larger arsenal of methods that political extremists believe to be entirely justified. As an April, 2009 TDS strategy memo noted, the defining feature of modern political extremism is the vision of politics as literally a form of “warfare” and political opponents as actual “enemies” who must be crushed. Although many political commentators routinely use these terms as metaphors in writing about political affairs, for political extremists they are seen as entirely literal statements of fact.

From this point of view many tactics that most Americans consider utterly unacceptable and indeed essentially criminal come to be seen as entirely logical measures that are required by the urgent demands of the bitter political “war”. The exposure of any one particular tactic does not challenge this underlying perspective. On the contrary it simply increases the urgency for developing alternative tactics that the evil “enemy” does not yet anticipate.

As a result, Democrats should be seriously prepared for the possibility that they will soon encounter tactics such as the following:

1. Staged events — there is a disturbingly thin line that separates wildly exaggerating the influence of tiny fringe groups like the New Black Panthers – as the conservative media has done in recent weeks – and directly encouraging or financially rewarding fringe groups to engage in offensive or illegal acts that can then be filmed and presented as spontaneous. Covert subsidies to radical fringe groups were employed in the 1960’s to disrupt and discredit Civil Rights demonstrations and in the 1930’s specialized anti-union firms commonly employed undercover agents to masquerade as union supporters and then create violence during strikes in order to provide the justification for sending in state troopers or the National Guard. A chilling echo of this tactic was recently hinted by a professional conservative activist in a Playboy magazine article when he noted that “creating mayhem is not limited to dealing with the press. We’ve quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at tea party rallies…” The potential threat is obvious.

2. Burglary or criminal trespass to obtain documents or other information –this tactic also has a long history, including the famous 1972 Watergate burglary of Democratic Party headquarters by Nixon’s “dirty tricks” squad and the recent abortive attempt of Breitbart’s protégé James McKeefe to install wiretapping devices in the office of La. Sen. Mary Landrieu. Most major foundations and non-profit organizations as well as political candidates and organizations have substantial amounts of information whose privacy they are legally and morally obligated to protect and whose disclosure can substantially cripple their operations. Any such information presents an extremely tempting target.

3. The sabotage, destruction, misuse or theft of valuable political files such as voter contact lists and contributor lists –– there are actually three different varieties of this tactic (1) the complete destruction of files (2) the misuse of files (for example, by mailing false messages that provoke discord between political allies) and (3) the subtle corruption of files to render them useless or largely ineffective.

4. Physical intimidation – there is an important distinction between protests that use civil disobedience based on the principles of non-violence and actions that are aimed at physically threatening and intimidating political opponents. In the 1980’s, for example, many anti-abortion protests carefully confined themselves to non-violent methods while other groups clearly planned their protests to physically threaten and terrify both clients and health care workers in the clinics they targeted.
 

Read more…

Anyone paying attention to the antics of two well-known Democratic pollsters-turned-strategists, Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, during the last year or so could see it coming. Both strongly opposed health care reform. Both started getting published and quoted a lot in conservative newspapers. Both joined Fox News as regulars. Both offered conservatives the delightful opportunity to claim a largely imaginary split among Democrats.
And now, in a joint column for the Wall Street Journal, the duo has made it official–they have become reliable members of the right-wing noise machine. I say that not because they are critical of Obama, but because their “case” for Obama’s “divisiveness” relies largely on some of the hoariest and least credible of conservative attack lines.
There’s a lot of nonsense in this column, particularly on Obama’s alleged refusal to pursue border enforcment (prosecutions for illegal border crossings have in fact gone up steadily since Obama was elected president). Attributing the atmosphere of partisanship primarily to the president is also absurd, as even fair-minded Republicans would admit. But the real smoking gun in terms of the Caddell-Schoen defection is the use of the entirely bogus New Black Panther Party “threat” to show Obama’s racial “divisiveness.”
The NBPP “scandal,” revolving around an isolated fool who yelled about “crackers” at an almost all-black polling place in Philadelphia (and who has been rewarded with regular Fox appearances to spout his inanities) has been entirely contrived by right-wing media who are always on the hunt for any evidence, however meager, of African-American voter fraud or intimidation.
Now Caddell and Schoen have every right to change their political allegiances and support the conservative line. It’s a free country. I wouldn’t have a problem if they chose to emulate Schoen’s old buddy Dick Morris, who finally just went ahead and became a familiar right-wing pundit after a brief period of playing the aggrieved-Democrat role. But if they are going to simply ape what their friends at Fox are saying, they need to stop calling themselves Democrats and trotting out their connection to the increasingly distant Democratic candidacies of the past. There’s nothing principled or honorable about posing as paper donkeys representing no one but themselves.

We’ve done our share of MSM-bashing hereabouts, and probably not enough shout-outs to the traditional media reporters and columnists who do a good job of covering politics. But MSM groveling at the behest of FoxTV and the wingnuts does seem to be on the upswing, and it requires a lot of effort just to hold them accountable.
For those who think this may be overstating the case, we refer you to Charles Kaiser’s Hillman Foundation article, published in The Nation, which does a solid job of chronicling some of the recent atrocities. Kaiser’s “The Shame of the Fourth Estate.” presents a thorough account of “the perversion of journalism” by “a band of vicious charlatans,” including in his words:

* Time magazine’s decision to ask Glenn Beck to assess Rush Limbaugh’s importance in America for the 2009 Time 100: “His consistency, insight and honesty have earned him a level of trust with his listeners that politicians can only dream of.”
* A decision by the editors of washingtonpost.com to allow Beck to host a chat there to promote one of his books.
* This hard-hitting assessment of Beck by Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, who gurgled on, “Sure, he may be selling a sensationalistic message of paranoia and social breakdown. But politics, or basic responsibility, aside, he has an entertainer’s sense of play with the medium of TV that O’Reilly, or perpetual sourpuss Neil Cavuto, don’t.” And why would anybody care about a basic sense of responsibility, anyway?
* A worshipful 1,943-word profile of Fox News founder and president Roger Ailes by David Carr and Tim Arango on the front page of the New York Times–which included this perfectly amoral quote from David Gergen, a perfectly amoral man:
“Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.” And what a wonderful conversation it is.
* And finally, the most sickening piece of all in this splendid cohort: David von Drehele’s obscenely sycophantic cover story of Beck for Time magazine, which told us that Beck is a “man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge;” that he is “tireless, funny, [and]self-deprecating…a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies–if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking.”

Here’s Kaiser on the MSM handling of the Sherrod and ACORN smears and Breitbart’s role.

But far worse than the kid-gloves treatment of Fox and its friends was the inexplicably benign approach the MSM took toward Andrew Brietbart, the original source of the doctored video of Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP that started this whole sorry saga.
In the Washington Post, he was a “conservative activist and blogger”; in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story in the Times, he was “a blogger” who “similarly…used edited videos to go after ACORN, the community organizing group;” in the Wall Street Journal he was “a conservative Internet activist” who “argued that the Obama administration is insufficiently sensitive to bias against white people”; in the Los Angeles Times, “a conservative media entrepreneur” and to Associated Press television writer David Bauder a “conservative activist” whose website “attracted attention last year for airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.”
But to find out who Breitbart really is, you would have had to read (h/t Joe Stouter) Joe Conason in Salon, who, “recalling Breitbart from his days as eager lackey to Matt Drudge…warned from the beginning that nothing he produced would resemble journalism.”

Regarding Glenn Beck’s splenetic smearing of the President, WaPo‘s Dana Milbank, quoted in Kaiser’s article, has this:

…Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News since Obama’s inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama–as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck’s nightly “report.”

Kaiser has more to say about the Sherrod smear and the press being hustled and intimidated by right-wing ideologues, and it all adds up to a very disturbing picture of one of America’s most important nongovernmental institutions. The time has come for America’s most influential print and electronic reporters and editors to do some soul-searching about their fearful compliance with neo-McCarthyism and reaffirm their commitment to social justice and journalism that serves the people.