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Oh how I wish Krugman had been on this show to rip this clown to pieces. . .
C&L: Matthew Dowd's False Equivalence: Obama Hatred Equals Bush Hatred

By Heather Tuesday Sep 08, 2009 3:00pm

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd tries to equate the left's hatred for George Bush with the over the top attack by the right wing about Obama's speech to school children. I'm sorry Matt, but it's not the same thing.

As Digby pointed out in her post where she talks about the media fueling this nonsense, there is a difference.

I know how she feels. I had the same reaction when George W. Bush was on television every five minute launching invasions of other countries for no good reason and yammering on about how oceans once protected us and now drone planes with biological weapons were coming to kill us all in our beds. It's easy to understand why this woman would be equally freaked out by the president trying to make sure everyone can go to a doctor when they get sick. It's scary stuff.

There's a part of all this that's simply a matter of the right riding the existing zeitgeist. For years liberals loudly denounced the neocons for their megalomania, warning about the ramifications of an America that has become a rogue superpower, torturing, invading and spying on its own citizens. It was a violent, frightening time with some real world consequences that are still not fully understood or absorbed.

The right, with their pretense of assuming the moral positions of their opposition, twisting their rhetoric to suit their own needs and basically use the other sides' own methods against them, have simply jumped on the bandwagon now that their boy is gone. These people are posing as civil libertarians afraid of an authoritarian take-over,something we all have felt recently. Because they've absorbed all the fear and concern of the past years, even as they rejected it, they are now able to emotionally apply it to the president they hate and it has the same emotional resonance, even if it is completely ludicrous.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel does a pretty good job of talking about how all of this is being fanned by "a right wing media that wants to cripple or take down Obama's presidency" and how we didn't see this when President's Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to school children, and then Dowd follows with this.

Dowd: Well it reminds me, to be honest it reminds me of exactly what the left was doing to George W. Bush in this time. There was no way no matter what he said, how he did, whatever he talked about that they would accept, react to well at all, no matter what he did. And the same is happening to Barack Obama.

In Matthew Dowd's world, the left being upset about being lied into war, the spying, the torture, stolen elections, using 9-11 to scare the crap out of the American public, tax breaks for the rich who don't need it, using the Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House and getting a Governor thrown into jail, outing a CIA agent because her husband dared to speak out against Dick Cheney, putting industry hacks in charge of every government oversight agency, and I could go on but I'll stop... being upset about those things is exactly the same as the right wing freaking out over a speech given to school children by President Obama. I don't think so.

Speaking of Paul Krugman, here he was on Aug 22: Reflexively anti-Bush

Marc Ambinder has emailed me to vehemently disagree with my characterization of his views. Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions.

But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.

Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.

Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.

And anyway, who were these reflexively anti-Bushists? Howard Dean? Read what he actually said at the time, and it looks totally sensible (and prescient). Me? I think my columns from that period look pretty sound in the light of hindsight. Bloggers like Atrios or Kos? Again, if you read their archives what’s striking is how sane they come off compared with the “serious” voices of the time.

So to repeat, it’s really sad to have people still writing as if those who failed to see what was right in front of their noses were the sober, serious ones.

C&L: Kurtz is Shocked That Ellsberg Would Compare WMD Lies to the Tonkin Gulf Incident

By Heather Tuesday Sep 08, 2009 7:00pm

h/t David

Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

KURTZ: Let me -- let me jump in here, because we're short on time.

Let me take you back to this incredible period in American history when you were targeted by the Nixon White House, as I mentioned earlier. Your psychiatrist's office was broke into in an effort to dig up dirt, on Daniel Ellsberg. And on the infamous White House tapes President Nixon said, to one of his aides, "Just get everything out, get it out, leak it out, I want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?"

What was it like to be on the receiving end of that kind of campaign from the president of the United States?

ELLSBERG: Of course, Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, were in exactly the receiving end of the same kind of operation from Rove and others in the administration of Cheney, Scooter Libby, and others. I felt very familiar with that one. Get that guy, destroy his credibility because Joe Wilson, former ambassador, had been telling the truth just as I told the truth with documents.

The lesson that I think is there right now, in the Obama administration, and any later administration, is if you, in the government, believe that your oath to uphold the Constitution is being violated by lies, by reckless adventures abroad, you should consider doing what I wish I had done in '64 and '65. Don't do what I did, wait until the war has started and the bombs have fallen. Do what I wish I had done earlier, go to the press, and to Congress -- not just Congress -- with documents, even though that may risk going to prison.

KURTZ: Let me ask you a last question here. "The New York Times" as you know, won a Pulitzer prize for exposing the Bush administration's secret domestic surveillance program, but Dick Cheney, among others, denounced the paper for doing that. Critics say that journalists who received and published classified information are every bit as morally culpable than the Daniel Ellsberg's of the world who actually leaked the material.

ELLSBERG: Well, if you think it was culpable. By the way, people who do that unless it involves communication intelligence, or the identity of covert operatives, as in the case of Valerie Plame, are not actually breaking the law in terms of any prior precedent.

KURTZ: What about morally?

(LAUGHTER)

ELLSBERG: Morally, I would say they are very complicit in not putting out that information when they understand that lives depend on their revealing it. And I feel I was culpable earlier and that those who have led to so many deaths, Iraqi and American in Iraq, by not risking their careers, are morally culpable for that. You have to make your choice. You have to make your decision as to where morality lies.

KURTZ: Daniel Ellsberg, thank you very much for joining us.

ELLSBERG: Thank you.