O'Reilly & Novak - racing toward the bottom

Two quotes caught my eye yesterday as I was scanning my usual Websites. I've already posted a Quote of the Week, but these two whoppers are worth noting.

Bill O'Reilly and Robert Novak are soulless on a good day, but I always get a special sort of joy when they show their true colors.

Bill O'Reilly, when discussing his latest fetish, Rosie O'Donnell, had this to say:

Never in the history of American television has one performer alienated so many people.

I couldn't stop laughing when I read he said that. Bill O'Reilly said that. I feel very sad for him.

Robert Novak, of Valerie Plame-fame, classlessly had this to say about Al Gore:

He enjoys being rich... he enjoys being an Oscar-winner... and I think he enjoys being fat, too.

I'm encouraged that Novak isn't waiting until Gore announces his candidacy for president (if he does) before attacking him, year 2000 style. Rather impressive, actually.

If I can psychoanalyze for a nanosecond, I'd say the early Gore attacks are a pretty good indication of how desperate the Right is about the GOP's chances to retain the White House in 2008. Maybe Karl Rove can feed Novak more people whose careers need ruining. So far, no luck, but there's still plenty of time before the '08 election.

And since Novak chooses to go into the gutter, I will for a second as well. Since he likes poking fun at Gore's midsection, he may want to put down the Twinkies himself.

Choosing who's the worst between these two is like choosing between food poisoning and a flaming case of hemorrhoids.

Bill Maher is truly on a roll

I've been a critic of Bill Maher on a few occasions, but this is most definitely not one of them.

He seems to be gaining steam as his show's new season rolls on, and his diatribe last night against President Bush is as spot on as I've heard in Bush's second term, and probably during his entire presidency.

There's really not a whole lot more I can add to Maher's words here - just roll the footage, laugh, and ponder, because Maher slammed this one out of the park.

And for those of you who think that he's a bit vulgar, he is. I'm vulgar, too, at times, so the guy resonates. Anyone who can be vulgar in a funny way, and slam home a political point like he so succinctly does here is damn fine by me.

I particularly like two things about this clip:

1. He questions not only the president's judgment, but also his patriotism. Bravo. And for those of you who think that's outrageous, go back and watch this video clip again, and listen to Maher's words about what these people did to Valerie Plame. And they did it because she's married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, who dared to stand up and say "No!" to the administration's well-documented bogus claims about the Niger "sale" of yellowcake to Iraq.

2. His quote about Mark Twain: "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."

I love how Maher finishes up, too: Hillary Clinton should run for president in 2008 with the slogan "Restoring honor and integrity to the Oval Office." That's the exact slogan that Bush used when running for president in 2000. Anyone think he's succeeded?

"Hey, at least there isn't SEX going on in the Oval Office anymore!" all the Clinton haters love to say.

Hogwash - Bush, Dick and Rove conjure up ways to sodomize their opponents each and every day. Okay, not every day - sometimes they spend the weekend in Camp David.

Keep 'em straight, Maher. You have no bigger fan right now than me.

Hume & Co. play Plame blame game

Wow, this didn't take long. The "Valerie Plame wasn't undercover" right-wing talking point rolls on, unabated, truth be damned. It's pretty laughable how the facts just won't get in the way of right-wingers with an agenda.

I also got a kick out of Hume throwing Scooter Libby under the bus about outing Plame. Anyone with two brain cells would rightfully ask the question, "Why would Scooter Libby expose Valerie Plame on his own?" The blatantly obvious answer is that he wouldn't have - the order had to come from above, either from Cheney (his immediate boss) or Karl Rove (everyone's boss).

It's amazing that Hume has fallen this far off the credibility wagon. It seems like a million years ago that he was a respected, yet pugnacious journalist working for ABC News. Brit Hume is just another right-wing pussy who has never gone into combat, yet he's quick to rattle the war sabres whenever given the chance. (Hume's also another conservative with a Vietnam deferment on his record. Oh hi, Mr. Vice President! Fancy meeting you in this parenthetical reference. Oh, and there's Karl Rove, and President Bush, too. Wow, the Vietnam War deferment warmonger gang is all here. Ahh, isn't that nice.)

Anyway, not much more to say about this clip, other than everyone should have seen this one coming, and even Plame herself can't be surprised at a broadcast like this.

Does Fox News have any credibility left? Like the president's, the network's cred is at an all-time low. The only surprise would have been if Fox didn't go after Plame's credibility; now THAT would have sent shock waves through the world of broadcast journalism.

UPDATE: Think Progress has a pretty good piece on Brit's bulls--t.

Fox's lame Plame lies & distortions

Like this was predictable. Fox News had its inaccurate take on the first day of the Valerie Plame testimony, so it bears a closer examination. I got this clip and info. for this post from Media Matters.

Thank God for Media Matters - a truly great organization founded by recovering Republican hate monger David Brock. MM is dedicated to uncovering the spin, hypocrisy and outright lies of the Right Wing Noise Machine that is so prevalent in our mainstream media today.

Anyway, watch the clip above before reading on. (Since YouTube is now getting suckier by the minute, thanks to corporate attorneys, it may be removed by the time you view this. If the clip isn't available, lemme know and I'll try reposting it.)

In this clip, Republican strategist Edwina Rogers appeared on the March 16 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto to "discuss" (distort) the testimony of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. During her appearance, Rogers falsely claimed that Plame "had been in Vanity Fair before any of this came out, sitting in a Jaguar, and she did not get permission from the CIA, which is required." As usual, a complete and total lie, fabrication, whatever you want to call it. But hey, it's Fox News, so what are the odds that it was an honest mistake? About as low as the president's approval ratings.

Rogers also states that posing in such a photo "was unacceptable for the CIA."

Rogers also claimed that Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who went to Niger to discover whether or not Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium for his phantom nuclear program, "had come back and didn't give the report to the CIA, but he turned it over in an Op-Ed to The New York Times." Another total lie, and testimony from the Libby trial bears this out. A CIA agent testified in the Libby trial that Wilson's findings were described in detail to the CIA more than a year before his Op-Ed was published in the Times. I

n his Op-Ed, Wilson asserted that "[i]n early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau."

It's painfully evident that this hack Rogers did no reporting or researching of her own, simply read off a script that Fox News gave her, or simply intentionally lied in another clumsy attempt to smear Plame. Does the right think that no one on the "left" side of things does any research or checks on these things? Anyway, Rogers alleges that because of these missteps, Plame "was already in the hot seat with the CIA."

The fact is, Plame's photos appeared in Vanity Fair several months after Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, column disclosed her identity, and Wilson's July 6, 2003, Times Op-Ed appeared long after he delivered his report on Niger to the CIA.

After all of these inaccuracies, host Neil Cavuto asked: "But [Plame] was in the hot seat - she was in the hot seat after she was in the hot seat, right? I mean, after this stuff came out, right?" But other than that, he let Rogers' inept assertions stand without correcting her numerous inaccuracies.

More facts that destroy the otherwise minuscule credibility of Rogers and Cavuto, from Media Matters:

Plame and Wilson appeared in the January 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, and the pictures in which she and Wilson appeared "in a convertible Jaguar" were taken on November 18, 2003 - a full four months after Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity in his column.

Media Matters also previously noted that on the October 11, 2005, edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, nationally syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham similarly suggested that White House senior adviser Karl Rove could not have outed Plame as an undercover agent because her identity was already known after she appeared "in Vanity Fair with her scarf and her sunglasses on."

These morons don't ever let facts get in the way of a good smear campaign, do they?

The unfortunate part about all of this is that there are plenty of sheep out there who willfully watch Faux News and believe whatever they see and hear at face value. (I know many of these people.) The lies just don't seem to matter, or Fox-o-philes simply dismiss the real facts as liberal lies presented to counter-argue the Fox lies.

These lies are intentional, too. Another example that readily comes to mind of Fox intentionally lying to make a Republican look better - the Mark Foley scandal. I'll never forget Sean Insanity, with nothing left to say and no way to spin the Foley mess, saying during a broadcast of Hannity and Colmes, "I don't mean to bring Clinton into this, but Monica Lewinsky was 19 when they had an affair." She was 22, but by saying she was 19, a total, intentional lie, it brought Monica's age closer to the age of the underage teenagers Foley was trying to bang.

As a Democrat, I realize that there are often people who aren't going to see things my way, and that's fine. But, have difference based on philosophy and beliefs, not lies.

Oh well - no one is above being smeared by the right-wing noise machine. If they can smear a presidential candidate with three Purple Hearts, they sure as hell can go after the likes of Plame.

As I watched the rest of this clip, it just amazed me how these arrogant imbeciles smear Plame. She's the victim here. Her identity was revealed in a national column, planted by members of the Bush Administration, to try and even a political score.

Lost in this whole thing, and certainly ignored by Repubes, is how her outing could have caused the her death, or other agents. Who knows if she's even in danger now? Or her husband? Kids? I've seen nothing in the mainstream media about that. She was simply a civil servant, doing her duty, and then her cover was blown.

Yet, there are a remarkable number of people who treat Scooter Libby, Robert Novak and Dick Cheney as victims.

To restate - Fox and its roster of right-wing hacks are smearing Plame for being outed as a CIA Agent. This has to anger all but the most extreme Republicans.

Deep Plame questioning reveals little

If you're like most Americans, myself included, you're tired of the whole Red State/Blue State of our politics. One can't get away from it - on any given issue - there's the blue perspective, the red perspective, and then there's the American voters, standing in the middle, asking themselves, "Who the hell do I believe?"

Part of the whole Red vs. Blue is the reason I started this blog, because I'm so outraged at the incessant spinning of any given issue over the last almost 15 years. Some days I feel hopelessly partisan, and I'm not always sure that's a good thing. I've followed politics since I was eight or nine years old, but I began to get active in politics before the 1992 presidential election, and even more so after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. When the Republicans came to power, it seemed like they didn't bring their rule book with them. Anything and everything was fair game, and this reached its zenith with the Clinton Impeachment.

My point with this rambling is that it's Republicans who have made dividing America an art form. There are endless examples during this Bush Administration. In many ways, I'd hoped that the highpoint (or low point) of the Republican "Karl Rove" politics had passed with the November 2006 election, when those tactics were turned aside by American voters. However, the more times goes on, I wonder if it was just a PAUSE instead of the end of the Republicans' Divide and Conquer strategy.

There are so many examples of the GOP's Divide and Conquer, I won't try to even name some from the past year, because I could be here all night. But, one glaring example as of late is the reintroduction of homosexuality into political discourse, but more on that in a separate post.

Another example is today's Valerie Plame testimony, when it didn't take long for partisanship to rear its ugly head...

Here's an exchange between Plame and Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) (There's little doubt this is only the beginning, as she isn't done testifying just yet.)...

Westmoreland: Just to keep score, not that you would put yourself in any political category, would you say that you are a Democrat or a Republican?

Plame: Congressman, I'm not sure that that is...

Westmoreland: I know, but I mean, I gave a list of questions I couldn't ask you, and that wasn't one of 'em.

Plame: Yes Congressman, I am a Democrat. [Plame was clearly annoyed]

Westmoreland: You're a Democrat? Okay. [His voice inflection dripping with sarcasm]

How predictable was this? Another canard brought up by a Republican when it looks like his party is in trouble. If this is the type of questions that are going to be asked of witnesses, why not just close the committee down? Or, have Sean Hannity come and ask questions - that way, at least the partisanship and stupidity is apparent before the questions even begin.

Westmoreland's question is the most asinine I've heard any lawmaker ask a witness in a long time. Can "Are you, or are you not a member of the Communist Party" be far behind?

Get used to seeing and hearing that exchange, over and over and over. Fox News may even loop that video on repeat instead of having late night programming. This exchange will slam the door shut for at least 1/3 of the American public. That will be all of the information that sticks in most Americans' minds:

"Well, she's a Democrat, so that's all I needed to know!"

Disgusting, pathetic and laughable.

Notice how Westmoreland phrased the question carefully, while attempting to sound innocent and almost apologetic while asking it. But, he did intentionally and with an covert motive - if he was a lawyer, you could say he was doing it to put a "reasonable doubt" in the minds of many Americans, and there's little doubt he succeeded - it's just a matter of how many. I'm sure after questioning was completed today, Westmoreland was high-fiving and chest bumping with Republican House leadership.

It's just breathtaking to me that this is the type of question ANY member of Congress would ask Plame. Part of the reason this matter has received the attention it has is because this is about the outing of a CIA agent to get revenge on Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson, who DARED to stand up against an administration hell bent on war.

Something like this should be above party politics, but of course, people like Westmoreland prevent it from being so. As an American, I'm interested in the truth in this case, no matter where the truth leads, just like I am with the Walter Reed hospital fiasco, the WMD debate, and a whole host of other issues that have come up in the last 6+ years.

Plame was a CIA operative who was working in the counter-proliferation department. (Read: Working to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons - you know, those pesky little things we went to war over. She was working to prevent terrorism - something this administration plants its flag at being the best at.) Plame was a covert operations officer, despite what you might her on Faux News Network, who have worked really hard to make the American public think that Plame was an insignificant CIA clerk or gofer.

I loved her testimony today that her CIA covert status was not common knowledge on "the Georgetown Cocktail Circuit." She had nothing to do with Joseph Wilson going to Niger, other than to come home one night to ask if he would come over to the CIA to talk to some people about the administration's claims of Iraq's WMDs.

As I type these words, the media is already offering its take on Plame's first day of testimony, but I'll end this one here. More thoughts on Plame's testimony later.

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Before I end this one, though - one more thought on Westmoreland, for fun. He cosponsored legislation to have the Ten Commandments displayed in the House of Representatives and Senate, and also in courthouses in a historical setting, separation of church and state be damned.

During an appearance on The Colbert Report (above right), he couldn't name the Ten Commandments when given the opportunity, stumbling after three. (Of course, his PR flak claimed that he got up to seven, but that part was edited out of the tape.) Hey, whatever - I'd think that a high-minded Christian who wishes to have his religious beliefs pushed on the American public would know the Ten Commandments, chapter & verse.