Republicans Are Really Good at Clearing Brush
If you follow me on twitter, you know that I’ve been anticipating the Republican attack on the Obama vacation by pointing out what Bush was doing 8 years ago (ignoring the PDB) or Cheney was doing 7 years ago (claiming Iraq was close to having nukes). So I want to give Andrea Mitchell kudos for–as I hoped reporters would do yesterday–calling out this bogus attack.
And KO’s take on this last night might as well have been a "best of" emptywheel’s "brush clearing" tweets.
We’ll see more of this attack in the mere 10 days that Obama is taking away from DC. May the rest of the press corpse dismiss it with at least as much disdain as Mitchell mustered.
Don’t be fooled, this is where they get the news Marcy. They stopped funding their news divisions some time back. News is part of the entertainment division, and they couldn’t justify the expense of investigative reporters.
Remember when we had many of them? Now we have Christiane Amanpour and wait for it, Horrendo Revolver for Faux. You are the edge.
The GOP’s problem is that even though Obama is on vacation, you aren’t. Stock up on coffee, there’s going to be a document dump they REALLY don’t want you have and you can bet it’ll be written in obfuscational bureaucratese. I’m just wondering how redacted it will be.
Boxturtle (I doubt Obama timed his vacation for this, but I’ll bet he’s pleased with the timing nonetheless)
Well, good for Mitchell. She threw in those tasty bits about Rick Scott’s background too.
This is why I was defending Mitchell as a very good reporter–albeit of the Village variety–the other day. I suspect having Mitchell call Scott out is worth far more than Olbermann and Rachel hitting him for a week straight, because different people listen to Mitchell.
Yes — I was sort of bad on that thread. I’m the same age she is and I’m a feminist — I shouldn’t be making cheap *rhymes-with-witchy* comments about her.
Well, she’s not perfect but it’s nice to see credit where it’s due.
In an industry notorious for putting young female eye candy on screen, there’s Mitchell — by appearances at least a few years over 30, and still working.
Whether I agree with her or not, the woman appears to have one hell of a work ethic and I respect that in anyone.
(It’s also clear from the intros to their pieces that Maddow and KO work at trying to develop context, which is precisely what Mitchell did here. And — with the egregious exception of a dreadful slam at the unions and Trumka last week — Dylan Ratigan is using a lot of creativity on MSNBC’s new “Morning Meeting” program to teach people basic concepts about why ‘too big to fail’ is not only dangerous, it’s stupid and based on lies. The more context gets embedded in news reporting, the more compelling the news becomes, IMHO.)
Hat’s to you, EW, for giving Mitchell a ‘high-five’ for this one.
As for the GOP, I think that MSMer Joe Klein is right on target by pointing out that the party has been taken over by nihilists. Why Ambinder couldn’t see that still mystifies, but I do get the sense that long-timers like Klein and Mitchell may finally be fed up with being brazenly lied to by GOP operatives.)
I maintain that the unreported reason that the press treated Palin like the hack she is (in addition to kick ass bloggers–particularly those in AK–speaking truth to power) is that a bunch of women in Mitchell’s generation were appalled to see this incompetent waltz in and be taken seriously without paying her dues. I also suspect that if KayBee Hutchinson had been picked, the press would have remained far kinder to McCain.
Of course, KayBee wouldn’t have turned out the fire-breathers like Palin. You’ve got trade-offs, in politics, always.
Oh, I’d take it even farther than that (being older than yourself, I’m quite certain).
I remember my surprised pleasure when a woman accountant that I’ve known for years commented last fall that she took one look at Sarah Palin, walked over to her computer and gave $$ to Obama-Biden. I’d never heard her mention giving to any candidate and suspect it may have been a first for her; so it was not altogether surprising that Barak Obama raised something phenomenal like $150,000,000 last September.
For ‘professional women’, who have had to balance work, family, soccer carpools, etc, etc, etc, a woman like Palin is an insult. You’ve seen the type and you instinctively distrust and dislike her; she’ll never pull her weight, she’ll take everything personally, and nothing will ever be her fault.
I’m far from perfect, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes.
But making mistakes is — at least in my experience — a whole different category from deliberate dishonesty. Mistakes are expensive, but often also the best way to learn. Dishonesty is incredibly expensive, and over time it doesn’t ‘pencil out’ so to speak.
If you’ve ever been saddled with ‘a Palin’, you’ve learned to: document, document, document, because you just know that you’ll have to cover your ass six kinds of sideways.
In contrast, Couric and Mitchell have had to deliver on time, make nice whether they like people or not, and produce. They work; year in, and year out.
So I agree with you that probably women in the media, who had to work damn hard to get where they are, took one look at Sarah Palin and realized the idiots in the GOP had lost their collective minds.
What was fascinating (and depressing) was to see how much the pick of Sarah Palin revealed about GOP attitudes toward women; it certainly appears that they think with some organ other than their brains. The paternalistic patronizing of ‘the women voter’ suggested they were still watching “Beach Blanket Bingo” or “Gidget”.
Thank God for Tina Fey, Katie Couric, and Andrea Mitchell for helping unmask Palin, and the really best thing about it was that they were only doing their jobs. Poetic justice ;-))
Sorry to rant at such length…. clearly, this is one of my ‘hot buttons’.
A great perspective and I am really glad to see Couric included. She has taken alot of heat; along the way she has also done some courageous and innovative things. Like with Palin, she almost made Ross Perot lose it; she did not back off.
I have seen her do interviews where she appeared spacey; where she had the opportunity to ask questions that would have been very revealling and instead she let it slip away.
I’m not arguing she’s perfect. I’m arguing she sometimes does good work, one of a few who does and yet is still a member of this elite club. And we’d be well served to understand that because she can position a story in a way that KO can’t and Rachel can’t yet.
She always seems spacy. See my comment about the window washing ropes! Does she have attention deficit disorder??
But she didn’t say anything substantive about Scott. She just sort of left a vague impression that he wasn’t a good businessman, or did something sort of wrong, or something…..
and then she was so distracted by the window washers’ ropes that she interrupted a discussion to talk about them.
Here’s advice from across the pond:
Time to nuke the Republican party
Republicans don’t want to pass real healthcare reform – so Democrats should push the button on the ‘nuclear option’
• Steven Guess
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 August 2009 13.00 BST
More.
wanna bet ???
I got faith in the fact that repuglitards suck at everything
having visions of multitudes of whining freepi yet ???
mothers are admonishing their children by telling the kids to “stop acting like a republican”, and you think the freepi would be competent at manual labor ???
it must be football season in Michigan
people start believing all kinds of foolish things at the start of a new season; Big Blue looks good this year, favre might have another good year left in him, the Lions could win a game, stuff like that …
an while I’m trash talkin, anybody seen the NFL channel promo where a Steeler kicks a football off a tee ???
first off, homeboy’s plant foot is off sides, and that ball is WAAAAAY under inflated
Marcy, I just want to say thank you to you and your dedicated commenters for the collaborative efforts on all these important stories. I’m a dedicated reader of FDL and you especially.
OT: Today there were anti- healthcare protests all around the country. My local news just had a story about our local event. This is a very repub area (Knoxville, TN)) but the pro and con protesters were equal. That says a win for our side IMHO.
Heavily redacted obfuscational bureaucratese… the mind boggles.
As to coffee:
With or without having a digit impaled?