beep beep

Do people really think this way? Seems like you’d have to have a sub-80 I.Q. to buy into this way of looking at the world.

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

I missed a paragraph in my paste into the compose page — please refresh your screen to get the whole post with the paragraph added into the mix. Sorry gang…

Sandman @ 3

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

Didn’t see it, but I suspect he meant defense as % of GDP. Also, war is off-budget, so some trickery there.

Even so, defense shouldn’t be thought of that way, but rather what are we getting into with defense spending. Look at outputs, or results, not inputs.

Zedigg

How to digg this article. Need to register the first time.

How to Spotlight this article.

What we need is a book, in the same vein as Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal (which I am currently reading). Conscience of a JOURNALIST. Yeah, there’s the ticket. Down with stenographers, up with actual investigative reporting!

Good Morning Christy…

I still like that TrueMajority game where you could decided the US budget by using oreo cookies stacked up where each cookie == Billion dollars. When that exercise was done, everyone took lots of cookies away from the defense budget and put them into citizen services EVEN Repugs.

It is a good way to graphically show people that if you give more cookies to the Pentagon/Blackwater etc then you take cookies away from children healthcare.

Christy, I don’t know how this works but the beginning of the article on the first page uses the name “Mort” Halperin, though the op-ed is by Mark Halperin.

Mort Halperin wouldn’t write such dreck (I used to work with him).

Well as it was EPU’ed in the last thread and on topic here:

Re Mark Halperin’s op-ed, I don’t think it is what it purports to be. I think it is an indirect attack on Hillary.

Halperin’s theme supposedly is that good campaigners don’t make good Presidents. So what examples does he give? Bill Clinton and George Bush.

This is your typical false comparison that MSM types love to use. Look how Clinton is described:

For instance, being all things to all people worked wonderfully well for Bill Clinton the candidate, but when his presidency ran into trouble, this trait was disastrous, particularly in the bumpy early years of his presidency and in the events leading up to his impeachment. The fun-loving campaigner with big appetites and an undisciplined manner squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency, and undermined his effectiveness as a leader. What much of the country found endearing in a candidate was troubling in a president.

As for Bush:

When George W. Bush ran in 2000, many voters liked his straightforward, uncomplicated mean-what-I-say-and-say-what-I-mean certainty. He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

As with Mr. Clinton, though, the very campaign strengths that got Mr. Bush elected led to his worst moments in office. Assuredness became stubbornness. His lack of lifelong ambition for the presidency translated into a failure to apply himself to the parts of the job that held less interest for him, often to disastrous effects. The once-appealing life outside of government and public affairs became a far-less appealing lack of experience. And Mr. Bush’s close-knit team has served as a barrier to fresh advice.

So Bill Clinton is undisciplined and Bush gosh darn it never really wanted to be President. Apparently it just fell on him when he was clearing brush.

But more than this, what Halperin is doing is equating Bush’s Presidency, the worst in our history, with Bill Clinton’s which is usually considered a fairly successful one.

Finally, I agree with those who have commented above: How come Halperin who is supposed to be a top political analyst is only coming to a “realization” that most of us have known for years if not decades?

eCAHNomics @ 5

Sandman @ 3

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

Didn’t see it, but I suspect he meant defense as % of GDP. Also, war is off-budget, so some trickery there.

Even so, defense shouldn’t be thought of that way, but rather what are we getting into with defense spending. Look at outputs, or results, not inputs.

I thought with the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the $100 billion spent on Star Wars(over the past 25 years) the Defense Budget would be quite large.

EB — It was a typo and I’ve already fixed it. Thanks for the heads up, though — refresh your whole page and you’ll see…

So in other words, Halperin validates ‘“campaigner equals leader” formula = recipe for sadness‘

Hope Tweety caught that bit today.

And I wish the fat cats would settle nicely with WGA so that The Daily Show could make hay with Halperin.

Hugh — I think you are right about this being a subtle swipe at Hillary. Right back to that junior high level of analysis, isn’t he? SIGH

Sandman @ 11

eCAHNomics @ 5

Didn’t see it, but I suspect he meant defense as % of GDP. Also, war is off-budget, so some trickery there.

Even so, defense shouldn’t be thought of that way, but rather what are we getting into with defense spending. Look at outputs, or results, not inputs.

I thought with the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the $100 billion spent on Star Wars(over the past 25 years) the Defense Budget would be quite large.

Googled it. It’s now about 4% of GDP, vs. 7-1/2% during Cold War, apparently. Don’t know whether the 4% includes war, as I’m not interested enuf to read the articles.

Remember, economy grew rapidly during Clinton & defense budget didn’t-the mythical Peace Dividend.

Funny thing about the google. Seems like it’s a meme that is popular in wingnut circles like Heritage. WANS (we are not surprised).

I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Marcy’s takedown of Mark Halpern (plus the number she did on Matt Bai on one of the click-throughs) got the morning off to a good start. And, Glenzilla was at his fiercest as he fried Joe Klein and the bulk of beltway “journalists” to crispy critters. It has been an excellent morning so far.

Sandman @ 3

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

This is the same tripe the “small government” bunch uses when discussing our trade deficits as well.

The Defense Dept. is hemorrhaging cash on and off the balance sheet, and what’s worse is it’s making us more vulnerable, not less.

We’re wasting scads of money and stuck with $100/barrel oil.

It takes special talent to pull that doubleheader off.

EB — It was a typo and I’ve already fixed it. Thanks for the heads up, though — refresh your whole page and you’ll see…

I should’a thought of that — thanks.

I agree with Hugh’s assessment too (at #10).

Have you ever noticed how uneventful the Clinton presidency really was in contrast to the Bush’s? times were generally good, there were few major foreign policy crises, it seemed that Clinton’s leadership was never really put to the stress test.
It’s kinda like going to a really good restaurant. All you can say after it’s over is that the food and service were really first rate. On the other hand, sometimes dining out becomes the source for a half hour comedy routine.A really well-run restaurant makes it look easy, much like well=run retail, but the truth is that it is far from easy to make it look like that.
The greatest testimonial to Clinton is that he made it look easy. Many businessmen want to own restaurants because they think it’s easy money. Mostly because they only dine in those places that make it look simple. The sentiment is actually a failure to appreciate the levels of complexity that are requires to be mastered.

Please pardon the OT, but from today’s IndyStar: Julia Carson (D-In 07) announced that she has terminal lung cancer.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/p...../711250402

This is the representative that *ilson46201 spent so much time working for, and is close to. He must be heartbroken. *ilson, if you’re out there lurking (he told me he still does occasionally), I feel for ya pal.

We’re losing a great progressive here, one with a fantastic voting record, and who has done great things for her constituents - including me.

This so sucks.

Will is one of the conservatives I enjoy reading. He actually provides arguments and sometimes data to support his positions. Wish there were more goopers like him. I don’t agree with him, of course, but he’s worth reading- unlike Goldberg- et al.

The Village idiots are always trying to externalize their own abject personal incompetence as an inescapable consequence of an inexorable tide of history. This is exactly what they did when it became clear how wrongity-wrongity-wrong they were in the runup to the Iraq war.

if the “wise elders of the Village” see a problem in what they are doing, how about doing their jobs better instead of just wallowing around in the descriptive and diagnostic phase? How about going out there and doing the jobs that the Fourth Estate used to do well — digging into the substance, the facts, the original sources on speeches and actions and legislation and such and doing some down and dirty real world comparisons on actions speaking louder than words? Now THAT would be something worth paying attention to — and it would be useful for all of us, wouldn’t it?

That’s crazy talk!

Now apologize to your media elite masters and no one will get hurt.

Thought you might enjoy this: On my local cable TV “Fox News” is off the air. Some sort of technical problem, but I thought it was funny.

Finally, Fox News off the air, if only for a little while.

For anyone interested, I’ve got a puzzles I created over at Daily Kos. Four of them have been solved (spoilers in the comments section), but two still have people guessing. If anyone wants to try their hand at them, go for it.

I make this point far too often, but it seems important. The invasion of Iraq didn’t achieve is prime objective, the elimination of Iraq’s WMD programs, because that objective had already been attained by Bill Clinton without loss of American lives and at very low cost in terms of money and no loss of international prestige. Why don’t people give him credit for that?

When I make this point, I usually quote Sun Tzu:

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. But his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. For inasmuch as they are gained over circumstnces that have not come to light, the world at large knows nothing of them, and he therfore wins no reputation for wisdom; and inasmuch as the hostile state submits before there has been any bloodshed, he receives no credit for courage. [Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 400BC]

Who runs CNN now? Because Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace are a waste of electrons.

By the way, I hope Nancy recovers from her hospital visit. (blood clots)

peanutbutter @ 7

What we need is a book, in the same vein as Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal (which I am currently reading). Conscience of a JOURNALIST. Yeah, there’s the ticket. Down with stenographers, up with actual investigative reporting!

David Shuster could write one from the telly angle, or of course KO.
Seymour Hersh w/all his experience would be great…
Digby, emptywheel, Glenn Greenwald, Murray Waas, Joe Conason, Josh Marshall, jeez, let’s see, so many from blogdom, starting off w/the headliners of FDL.
Several potential great reads right there.

This guy seems to think that he needs to knock both Clinton and Bush in order to make his point non-partisan- his indictment of Clinton is pretty weak. His major point, though, that campaign skills are not a great predictor of governing skills is a good (albeit obvious) one..

His article is also a setup which will enable him to repudiate whichever less than mainstream candidate on either side garners
a large amount of campaign support: think Kucinich or Paul. Of course, his reasoning is specious all around…Clinton was a mostly good president honestly elected..Bush on the otherhand, a disaster installed by theft.

Wait a minute. Maybe this column has nothing to do with the MSM. I think he is preframing the Republican campaign meme:

Just because the Democrats have a great candidate and we have a crappy candidate doesn’t mean the Democrat will be the better president.

In the late 18th century the United States had a population of approximately 3 million people. In that population we found political giants to lead us.

Today, with roughly 100 times that population, we are governed my individuals that are unlikely to be remembered as giants.

Why? The system discourages the best from becoming involved. The insipid Fourth Estate, as represented by the likes of Halperin, is a good part of this.

Rayne @ 13

So in other words, Halperin validates ‘“campaigner equals leader” formula = recipe for sadness‘

Hope Tweety caught that bit today.

And I wish the fat cats would settle nicely with WGA so that The Daily Show could make hay with Halperin.

Did you see Krugman’s take down of Halperin today?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c.....ng-across/

What this article is actually proclaiming is that american democracy as currently structured delivers shitty presidents. If true, this is a HUGE problem- so what’s this guy’s solution?

jayt @ 20

Please pardon the OT, but from today’s IndyStar: Julia Carson (D-In 07) announced that she has terminal lung cancer.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/p...../711250402

This is the representative that *ilson46201 spent so much time working for, and is close to. He must be heartbroken. *ilson, if you’re out there lurking (he told me he still does occasionally), I feel for ya pal.

We’re losing a great progressive here, one with a fantastic voting record, and who has done great things for her constituents - including me.

This so sucks.

absolutely heartbreaking.

Good Morning Doggies.

Fantastic post Christy! Right on target imo, and absolutely loaded with powerful ammunition we can all use hot off the toobz. Woo Hoo!

now…, where’s that rahm fella hidin’… Git out here boy, and listen good!!!

Yet again, I must invoke the words of Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Mark Halperin isn’t paid to understand things. He’s paid to try and keep us from understanding them.

The oozing slime that is the American political media is endless.

So, Clinton = Bush, somehow. That’s all you need to know.

Halperin is trying hard to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.

BTW, the political media will never abandon the horserace, or triviality, because the last thing they want is a real discussion of policy, or an election based on such. Covering the horserace and trivia is a political, rather than a journalistic, act.

Joe Klein’s conscience @ 33

Rayne @ 13

So in other words, Halperin validates ‘“campaigner equals leader” formula = recipe for sadness‘

Hope Tweety caught that bit today.

And I wish the fat cats would settle nicely with WGA so that The Daily Show could make hay with Halperin.

Did you see Krugman’s take down of Halperin today?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c.....ng-across/

Ouch!

Joe Klein’s conscience — ooooh, that Krugman take-down is a work of art. Nice! Thanks for the link — I updated and H/T’d you above.

I’ve felt out of touch with the world since “There you go again,” and “I’m paying for this microphone,” identified “the Great Communicator.” And, apparently those kinds of communication skills were the crucial requirement for a great presidency.

OT, but I’m sure you all read about the WaTimes nonsense, ‘Democrats now the party of the rich.’ Based on median household income figures for congressional districts. Greg Sargent already picked apart the statistical fallacy, pointing out that the WT assertion that Dems hold seats in just over 50% of the ‘wealthiest 167 districts’ is kind of obliterated by the simple fact that this is a SMALLER percentage than the Democrats’ OVERALL % of seats held.

I just wanted to add that you can go further. The average Democratic congressperson’s district, by 2000 census figures, has a median household income TWENTY-SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS LESS than the average GOP congressperson’s.

http://www.techpolitics.org/co....._order=asc

Cut’n'pasted to Excel, it’s easy to see for yourself. Only, remember to leave out the very first line from the Dems’ numbers, it’s for a vacant Georgia district.

Sorry for OT - is anyone else unable to load youtube?

LindaR @ 31

Wait a minute. Maybe this column has nothing to do with the MSM. I think he is preframing the Republican campaign meme:

Just because the Democrats have a great candidate and we have a crappy candidate doesn’t mean the Democrat will be the better president.

I wondered as I read it if it wasn’t a way to present Rudy or even McCain in a better light.

rwcole @ 34

What this article is actually proclaiming is that american democracy as currently structured delivers shitty presidents. If true, this is a HUGE problem- so what’s this guy’s solution?

Halperin has (as usual) fundamentally missed the point. As noxious as the abysmal horserace reporting of campaigns is, the real rot in our political system comes from the money which has come to own our political process. That money not only buys the candidates but the press (as represented by Halperin) as well.

on you tube I get:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Joe Klein’s conscience @ 33

Did you see Krugman’s take down of Halperin today?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c.....ng-across/

Ever notice that a REAL artist, a true master, is defined by their ability to express the inexpressible with a maximum economy of brushstrokes or words?

Krugman. Un vero maestro.

on you tube I get:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Me too.

Hugh @ 44

Halperin has (as usual) fundamentally missed the point. As noxious as the abysmal horserace reporting of campaigns is, the real rot in our political system comes from the money which has come to own our political process. That money not only buys the candidates but the press (as represented by Halperin) as well.

I wonder what percentage of all that money raised goes to the MSM for campaign advertising?

twolf1 @ 43

Sorry for OT - is anyone else unable to load youtube?

No worky.

Morning all.
Same here twolf1.

Halperin:

Both [Bush and Clinton] claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs.

Uh, I was a young’n at the time, but I’m pretty sure Clinton was a solid frontrunner against Dole in ‘96.

But that’s not nearly as bad as his suggestion that Clinton and Bush had an equal discrepancy between their abilities as campaigners and their performances as president. Clinton was an unusually popular president, and while the “success” of his presidency is of course open to interpretation, it’s simply incredible to imply he was anywhere near the disaster Bush has been.

But Halperin lives in fear of the GOP base stealing his lunch money, and grovels before them every chance he gets, so what do you expect?

The reason the political press will never give up the horse race meme is our culture’s infatuation with winners. This I think is the reason for the rise of the independent voter. The people, for better or worse, stay with the traditional parties. The independents want to feel good about themselves by voting for a winner.

The system discourages the best from becoming involved. The insipid Fourth Estate, as represented by the likes of Halperin, is a good part of this.

I think the Corporate Controlled Conservative Press journalism system has the same problem.

I’ve been in a few environments in my life (high school, certain corporations) where the ‘little poeple’ on the frontline, so to speak, have very little power, and it tends to breed a catty, juvenile environment of conformism, bullying and craven stupidity where the thoughtful and intellgient are shunted aside by the authoritarians who are adept game-players, the ass-kissers, and the ruthless and unprincipled.

Cultures like this tend to produce mediocre performance, but they are easier for people at the top to control, which is why they are so prevalent.

Washington’s Village ‘Journalism’ positively reeks of this kind of culture, and the elections process suffers terribly because of it.

The how-they-come-across journalists would do well to heed Chaucer: “Handsome is as handsome does.” The folly of judging books by their covers has been known for millenia. What part of that hadn’t Halpern been taught as a child?

I’d like to hear a qualified person’s opinion of the dynamic that goes on between G.W.Bush and — well, anyone he’s trying to get something from, which might mean everyone he meets. I saw him working a crowd the other night, and the man is a manic, energy-sucking parasite. Watch him during speeches: his pauses are the times when he assesses his effect on his hearers. Watch him with another pol: think of the physical, body language he pulled with McCain, the arm around Sarkozy’s shoulders.

What does it show about the man, and why on anybody’s good green earth would a person would a person think that GWB would put any being’s welfare above his own?

Helpless Dancer @ 52

The reason the political press will never give up the horse race meme is our culture’s infatuation with winners. This I think is the reason for the rise of the independent voter. The people who believe in a particular political philosophy, for better or worse, stay with the traditional parties. The independents want to feel good about themselves by voting for a winner.

Edited because I left out half a sentence.

MikeG-
FDL prefers that commenters pick a screenname and stick with it. If you must change it, please note it in your name field (NewUserName, formerly OldUserName).
Thanks.

Biggest reasons why style outruns substance in presidential politics:

Public is too lazy to listen to substance

Press doesn’t like to cover substance.

Biggest reasons why style outruns substance in presidential politics:

Public is too lazy to listen to substance

Press doesn’t like to cover substance.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the traditional media to do the work of the 4th Estate. They are doing the work by serving their real masters, the corporate and celebrity elite. In that sense they are very successful.

More than a few “wise elders” recently wondered what vote caging was. Maybe if they weren’t so busy pretending that blogs are beneath their notice, they might learn something.
It’s hard to believe that they don’t have any friends or family that might challenge at least some inaccurate bits in the pieces they write.
What a Mr. Magoo world they live in.

EPU’s from last thread but relevant.

In fact the two characteristics that Halperin asserts resulted in failure for Clinton and Bush, respectively, are direct opposites.

He claims that the easygoing “all things to all people” Clinton should have been a less flexible and more of a stubborn idealogue when he came into office.

Then he asserts that Dubya was doomed by not being more flexible and not so stubborn.

First it’s amazing that Halperin can even compare the failures of Clinton with Bush. Clinton’s two terms were broadly considered economically succesful and productive in terms of education, job production, reducing the Federal deficit and debt, not entangling the US in costly and deadly foreign conflicts (Somalia was a Bush Sr, legacy, while Bosnia and Kosovo were generally successful campaigns that ended ethnic cleansing). There were some failures but these were almost all due to reactionary push-back by a Republican controlled Congress, or the knowledge that they would interfere with any policy efforts (Rwanda, Health Care, Kyoto Accord, Anti-Terrorist Legislation after OK City, Disabling N Koreas Nuclear Facilities). Even his Welfare Reform plans had less apparent impacts on the poor than expected as there was a booming economy and lots of employment.

Imagine if all that legislation had not been swallowed up by the bottomless Whitewater investigation and Republican intransigence.
The genocidal wars in Central Africa may have been averted, we’d have an America not beset with greedy HMO’s and insurance companies that remove services or clients off their protection. Global Warming wouldn’t be lapping at our doors causing droughts, wildfires in Winter, and Katrina-like hurricanes. Improved airline/airport security may have saved one or more of the 9/11 flights, and perhaps warned others. North Korea and Iran might be in total IAEA compliance. And the $$$ saved from not invading Iraq would be available to pay off the deficit, used for protecting social security, and provide better health care and education.

Amazing that Halperin can suggest two polar opposite things resulted in these Presidents failures and conceal it in a pile of verbiage.

Sandman @ 3

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

Maybe he’s comparing it as a % of some economic measure like GDP or GNP or maybe the well-known GOP drop point.

But when he starts spewing such things as this he should also tell us that the war in Iraq alone will cost the average American family $20,000 (and that doesn’t even include the rest of the military budget).

Of course, his rejoinder will be something like “But that’s only $3000 in WW2 Money”. Or $20,000 is only 12,000 Euros…that’s not even enough to pay for my Faberge eyeglasses.

Just realized the two guys I’d really prefer to see write op-eds on presidential campaign journalism- Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay.

Sandman @ 11

eCAHNomics @ 5

Didn’t see it, but I suspect he meant defense as % of GDP. Also, war is off-budget, so some trickery there.

Even so, defense shouldn’t be thought of that way, but rather what are we getting into with defense spending. Look at outputs, or results, not inputs.

I thought with the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the $100 billion spent on Star Wars(over the past 25 years) the Defense Budget would be quite large.

Maybe it’s equivalent, in inflation based dollars, to the peak Reagan Years that sent the economy into a recession and the country into deep deficits.

cinnamonape @ 61

Amazing that Halperin can suggest two polar opposite things resulted in these Presidents failures and conceal it in a pile of verbiage.

Everything about this piece is false, phony, and dishonest. It has a surface form of a comparison and an argument but as soon as you scratch that surface it all falls apart. It portrays itself as media criticism by a media person but is not in the sense it was intended. Rather it makes you wonder about the state of the media if this is the kind of criticism that a media person would come up with and which that bastion of Establishment media the New York Times would put its imprimatur on.

And this is even without taking into account all of the political angles and subtexts: a slap at the Clintons, an oblique defense of the weak Republican field of Presidential candidates.

I LOVED the Krugman piece. LOL