The problem is two-fold:Republican true colors in BP embrace Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz talks with Rachel Maddow about Republicans' shameless and unabashed embrace of big oil and special interests over America and Americans.
1. Regardless of whether you believe anyone should be talking about Sarah Palin, the woman is a leader in the Republican party, and could, by a fluke of nature, end up president some day. So it's important to report on her inanities, if only to keep people informed of what a lightweight nut she really is.
2. The media has, to a larger part, accepted that Palin is a nut. Sure, they report on her every move, because they have to, but at the same time they're loathe to examine her comments and hold her responsible for them because, secretly, they know she's a little stupid, and nuts, so they give her a pass on actually discussing the implications of her comments. Had a leader of the Democratic party - an aspiring presidential candidate, no less - compared George Bush to Hitler, it'd be the end of their career. Now we have dingbats like Palin, and even GOP members of Congress, making the comparison with impunity. At some point, the media needs to stop reporting what Republicans say, and start analyzing it for the extremist, and dangerous, rhetoric it actually is.
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John Cole: Another Head for the Right and the LeftJohn Cole: Potty Training By Judith Miller and Sally QuinnDave Weigel just resigned. He provided fair and accurate coverage for the Washington Post, but because he said something obnoxious on a private email list after Drudge sent hundreds of screaming wingnuts after him and the DC Examiner printed the name and workplace of his girlfriend, he was forced out. Not because of any of his professional work, but because of a couple intemperate remarks on an allegedly private listserv.
Bill Kristol, Jackson Diehl, Marc Thiessen, whose far more offensive comments are printed on the opinion page every week, still have jobs.
I hope they find out who leaked the emails and his/her career is equally damaged. This is a disgrace.
Is there anyway to set up an ActBlue account to donate to Dave until he finds a new job? Or maybe he has a paypal account. Anyone know?
*** Update ***
Maybe he can make a video calling Hillary Clinton a bitch and that will get him his job back.
If this doesn’t make you want to throw up in your mouth, I don’t know what will:
“How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?” one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. “I’m not suggesting that many people on the paper don’t lean left, but there’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.”I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.
That’s the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who single-handedly wrote the absolutely most factless pieces of propaganda in the run-up to the war in Iraq this side of Judy Miller, and to my knowledge has never corrected the record in detail and atoned for his sins.
That’s the same Jeffrey Goldberg who is so incapable of forming constructive arguments that he basically spent the earlier part of the year sputtering that his co-worker Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Israeli propagandist. That is, of course, until the adults at the Atlantic stepped in and told him to knock it off.
And we could go on and on, whether the topic is Chas Freeman, Iran, etc.
If that is the kind of bile and trash that Jeffrey Goldberg thinks makes him a refined and “toilet-trained” writer, then I can only assume that every one of the adults in his blackberry and in his rolodex still shits the bed. The rules still hold true- all sorts of disgusting and bizarre worldviews are acceptable among the “toilet-trained” Beltway elites (Krauthammer, Will, Thiessen, Kristol, and many others still write for the WaPo), but don’t drink out of the finger bowl or use a four letter word or your ass is history.
- Atrios adds:
Ezra Klein writes for the Post. He's on the liberalish side of things. But if someone released some private emails in which he said mean things about Supreme Commander Markos, Paul Begala, and Rachel Maddow, no one at the Post would have batted an eye. Probably they would have seen it as evidence that he was a great hire for his willingness to Stand Up To Powerful Liberals.
Weigel was hired to cover the conservative movement, and he's really the only person who does that well. I don't know much about about his personal politics, though I've generally inferred from knowing him at bit and his time running in Reason circles that he's a liberalish libertarian, which is really just another way of saying he's a libertarian whose concerns aren't usually in lockstep with the glibertarians in the sponsored libertarian movement. But apparently the Post needs its "conservatives" to be conservative hacks, and not hurt Matt Drudge's feefees.
You know how Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal likes to blame the Federal government for the damage caused by BP's oil spill, arguing that he could have kept all the oil at bay if President Obama had only given him the resources he needed to fight it?
Well, last night CBS News tore Jindal's argument to shreds, pointing out that while President Obama has authorized up to 6,000 National Guard troops to fight the spill, Jindal has only activated 1,053 of them -- leaving more than 80% sitting idle, doing nothing to protect the state.
It's must-see-tv (text version here):
When CBS confronted Jindal about leaving so many guardsmen idle while oil is washing ashore, Jindal -- naturally -- blamed the Federal government, saying that he had requested deployment for the full 6,000, but that his request had been denied because "the Coast Guard and BP had to authorize individual tasks."
It turns out Jindal's response was a lie.
But Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander in charge of the government's response to the spill, said Jindal is just flat wrong.
"There is nothing standing in the governor's way from utilizing more National Guard troops," Allen said.
In fact, the Coast Guard says every request to use the National Guard has been approved, usually within a day. Now Jindal's office acknowledged to CBS News the governor has not specifically asked for more Guard troops to be deployed.
This is a very big deal. It exposes the fact that Jindal has been playing politics with the spill from day one. He's argued that the federal government has denied him the resources he needs to fight the spill, but even though he's had thousands of National Guardsmen at his disposal, he's only used a tiny fraction of them, allowing more than 80% of the resources at his disposal to go unused.
In light of Jindal's massive under utilization of National Guard resources, it's clear that his attacks on the Obama administration were motivated first and foremost by politics. More than anything else, Jindal wanted to take the heat off the oil industry and put it on the government.
Well, Bobby, mission accomplished. Too bad you didn't give a damn about stopping the oil.
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