So, Who’s Next on the Rovian Guillotine?

Note: Moose of Darkness will appear tomorrow.

Dave Weigel, recently hired by the Washington Post, “offered his resignation” over comments made on a listserv group founded by Ezra Klein being gleefully pushed by Fishbowl DC‘s gossip columnist Betsy Rothstein and Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller (Tucker Carlson’s new figurehead blog/online zine). Strong’s piece is a perfect case study in smear. He cherry picks quotes, and then places them in “context” by carefully introducing each quote shorn of context, but with the context that Strong desires — an act tantamount to carefully smearing a cherry farmer by starting with a maraschino cherry on top of a decadent dessert and reverse-linking the concepts so that the cherry farmer is intentionally creating massive heart attacks in consumers of said dessert.

It’s worth a critical read.

Weigel offered an apology, but, as we know, those only work for Republican senators caught with hookers, caught paying off mistresses, or soliciting sex in a notorious men’s room at a Minnesota airport. For journalists?

The Washington Post, under pressure from the Rightie Blogosmear (or, perhaps, anticipating it) accepted Weigel’s resignation.

(And, as Ed Morrissey shakes his head, stating the morally apparent while hiding the fact that he’s been on many a hanging posse himself, the Usual Suspects gleefully flay the corpse — Read the “Atlas Shrugs” headline if nothing else.)

Consider that just a couple of days ago, General Stanley McChrystal was brought down by a freelance journalist writing for Rolling Stone. So, the same sorts of comments surface on David Weigel, and HE is brought down.

Coincidence?

Consider Helen Thomas, ALSO brought down by impolitic comments a couple weeks ago, ALSO from a somewhat obscure source.

Know what to kiss and what you can and can’t say

Or consider the sheer weirdness of smearing Al Gore with sexual harassment charges that allegedly took place in 2006, when a “licensed massage therapist” made three appointments to talk to Portland detectives and broke all three, with her attorney telling the Portland PD that the matter would be pursued through “civil” litigation.

And then in 2009, she shows up with a weirdly pornographic statement to keep the issue on the record, admitting that she preserved some slacks that might have contained “bodily fluids” (a la the infamous “Blue Dress” with Clinton semen that Monica Lewinsky preserved on the advice of her “friend” Linda Tripp who was simultaneously getting her marching orders from Jonah Goldberg’s mom, Lucianne Goldberg, through whom Tripp was trying to shop a book).

Then, at some point between 2006 and 2009 she launders the slacks. But makes pointed mention of the fact in her deposition, released under a “Freedom of Information” request, so that the media can poke through the garbage untrammeled by legal proceedings. Odd that this occurs just at the moment when Al Gore could be MOST politically useful in the upcoming climate / global warming / energy policy debates.

These days, when someone’s being publicly flayed, rather than join in the gleeful junior high school Beavis & Butthead sniggering that generally characterizes the maturity of our “professional” press, you’ve GOT to ask WHO does this destruction benefit?

Or, recall what they did to Dan Rather in 2004, on the eve of the election when the reporting PROVED beyond a shadow of a doubt that George W. Bush had strings pulled to keep him out of Vietnam and then didn’t even feel like living up to his Air National Guard obligations.

But a “t” was not crossed and an “i” was not dotted.

Dan Rather, Helen Thomas, Dave Weigel. Compare and contrast.

Or, remember: the Invisible Hand always leaves a footprint.

A bird in the hand …

(And, as a corollary, if the Right attacks you, there will be a stampede to the liberal bathroom as everyone disavows ever shaking your hand, and, even if they had, it was before they knew what an awful person you are, not being perfect and all. They NEVER have your back; they NEVER defend you. Wit(l?)ness Andrew Sullivan with the Obligatory rejoinder (and anyone making such a comment below will have it cheerfully blasted into random electron clouds and returned to the cosmic background radiation):

The Dish has long seen Dave Weigel as one of the brightest stars in the next generation of journalists. He deserves to prosper. But he needs to get off that listserv.

No problem: the listserv is no more.

In other words: he shoudn’t a wroted them things what was quoted.

And, by implication, he did it to himself. Therefore, while I can tsk-tsk and shake my hoary head, no defense from me. Limbaugh gets caught in full-on Hillbilly heroin addiction, doing deals in parking lots, and a nation of Talking Pointy Heads drowns out all (legitimate) condemnation with “it was PRESCRIPTION DRUGS,” as though buying medicinal grade cocaine in the same parking lot would be OK, based on the quality of manufacturing.

Weigel notes privately that the righties are assholes, and all hell breaks loose. (Er, proving the veracity of his observation.)

I guess it’s a job-losing offense for any reporter to notice that Republican politics, manners and morality have descended to a level that a tribe still engaging in headhunting and cannibalism would find morally repugnant.

I can’t IMAGINE where anyone could get the impression that the Rovaks aren’t Paragons of Virtue and Pillars of Morality. And, until recently, I couldn’t imagine an America where it would be toxic and a job-losing proposition to speak your mind privately. Especially when there’s nothing in Weigel’s off-the-record writings that is any more controversial than “the Earth goes around the Sun.”

Oh. Wait. Maybe that’s not such a good analogy, given the current public opinion on that controversial “evolution” of Mr. Darwin.

Not today, Cheetah. Jane have sniffle nose.

We used to admit a strong public code of hypocrisy: we have created democratic and republican (neither capitalized, but, in the dictionary sense) ideals that are so highfalutin’ that it is impossible to actually live them. So, we admire John F. Kennedy for PT 109 and carefully fail to report his womanizing. Public and private were carefully circumscribed  and mutually exclusive spheres.

Your promise meant something, and giving your “word” was a duty and debt of honor.

Now, we’re all 16-year-old big brothers sneaking into little sister’s bedroom, finding her hidden diary and picking the lock to read it.

What Weigel said had a reasonable expectation of privacy. What Helen Thomas told Rabbi Video would have been pretty well ignored as outside the purview of news. Unless they’re caught in the Tidal Basin, splashing with strippers, drunk and in the nude, what reporters do is virtually NEVER newsworthy.

And smearing a reporter is a danger that ALL reporters need to take seriously. (I say that as someone who’s been publicly smeared for getting too close to the uncomfortable truth.)

It’s been admitted that Karl Rove has a major “consulting” position with the sort of shadowy GOP midterm election campaign.

And what have we gotten?

Well, consider what they did to Van  Jones (see “Glenn Beck Convenes a Lynch Mob” 4 Sept 2009)  and ACORN (see “Here’s Your Monday News, Early,” 29 November 2009).

A series of scandals, often targeting someone, like John Edwards, completely out of any official public position. It’s sort of like that “joke” that John Kerry made, jumped on by the rightie kerfuffle machine, JUST as the Presidential Sweepstakes 2008 was getting underway, in late October 2006. Any possibility of Kerry tossing his hat into the ring was neatly squashed by making him a national joke.

And, Al Gore has been the subject of more misguided and mean spirited vitriol than perhaps any figure in American public life. (OK: Michael Jackson is dead. I mean living American.) Rush has been on his case going back to his stint as a Senator from Tennessee. And remember the (false) “I invented the internet” smear during the 2000 election? And the whole phony “Buddhist Temple” kerfuffle?

Or, consider the extremely creepy pushing forward a meme of “Al Gore Fat Rich Date Rapist” just a week after the Gores’ separation, KNOWING that Tiger-Woods-Type speculation on the marriage would spread through Tabloidland gossip media like newspapers crumpled up and doused with charcoal starter fluid.

When it seems too good to be true, it usually is. So, ask yourself, “Who benefits from the destruction of this human being by the  curaré-tipped blow-darts of the Rovian savages and the ugly decapitation and defenestration of the corpse by the hyenas and vultures of the ‘legitimate’ media?”

Reasoned Rovian Rhetoric

Gee. After listening to the whole phony Rasmussen-fueled meme that the Democrats are going to experience HUGE midterm losses since JANUARY — and anyone who thinks they can predict American politics a year out is a far bigger fool than even I could aspire to be — it’s clear that the GOP and its media functionaries are running a black-bag psy-ops operation on us all.

And yes, it IS Goebbels-like. Why? Because Goebbels finally junked ALL facts from his media monopoly. So, he just manufactured his OWN reality — a reality so effective that until the Russian tanks reached the outskirts of town, Berliners generally thought they were WINNING the war.

So, who benefits? And whose fingerprints are all over the Gumshoe of Time?

Take a few nanoseconds to consider your answer.

All right. Pencils down.

Remember, Karl Rove has paralleled and evolved from a little draft-deferment tadpole working on the 1972 Nixon CREEP under dirty trickster Donald Segretti, who, with certain other USC alums, had specialized in “rigging” student elections, stuffing ballot boxes and other key election manipulation skills that ended up forming the careers of a thousand small-time Republican operators, from Lee Atwater and the smearing of Michael Dukakis in an utterly shameful manner to the fellows convicted of jamming the New Hampshire phone lines of the Democratic HQ on election day a few years back.

Karl shows his Republican solidarity with
average Americans everywhere

All of which begs the simple question: If Republicanism is so damned great, how come they will do ANYTHING to keep an election from being an honest choice between two competing worldviews?

And if it’s so goddammed holy, then how come it has polarized and ostracised family members one from another, across the length and breadth of this once and future great land?

Is this a politics of deceit and smear, character and professional assassination (Helen Thomas and David Weigel) with the news media as its yapping lapdog, happily disemboweling whomever the Fickle Finger of Roveate Displeasure points to?

Does anyone remember that a mere eight years ago, “criticising the President in Time of War” was tantamount to treason? The almost McCarthyesque chill that gripped the land?

You know: From them what suddenly demand “fiscal responsibility”?

“This is an impressive crowd — the haves and the have-mores.
Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”
– GOP Nominee George W. Bush, October 2000

There are legitimate differences between the Conservative and Liberal philosophical positions. Our system of governance is designed to TAKE those differences into account, in what evolved into a natural dialectic engine, two parties with large third-party movements — whose fundamental issues were swallowed into the two “mainstream” parties, from the “Free Soil” movement, to the “Progressives,” the “Know Nothings” and the “Copperheads” to the “Tea Party” and Ross Perot’s “Reform Party.”

And nobody ever gets entirely what they want. But, increasingly, the ONLY form of Republican governance is “block and smear.”

David Weigel was a rising star and a good journalist. He threatened somebody in that Rovian Sphere (otherwise known as “ball of snakes”) and was taken out. And Helen Thomas had so many enemies that (like Dan Rather) nobody was about to come to her defense.

Because the damned are united in their serpentine ways and means.

While the elect are always willing to cast the SECOND stone (and third and googleplex), as long as they weren’t the first. Circular firing squad is the favorite yoga position of low journalism (if that’s not redundant these daze) and progressives, liberals and “leftists.” *

[* 'Leftists' is a recent coinage in the new parlance of hate. Liberal wasn't plosive enough to say and spit at the same time, evidently. For fifty years "leftist rebels" was a polite way of saying "commies" or "pinkos." Now, the implication is that we non-KKKonservatives -- RINOs included -- are all Che Guevera.]

And the Fat Cats scream “Mousie Dung!”

When you listen to the way they speak of us, you wonder what their reaction would be to our calling them “ratfucking bastards” which is the INFLECTION generally given to “liberals.” We speak in an increasing code of hatespeak, but still the fact remains that you can spray all the Glade® you want, but that chili-fart is still going to hang in the air as a sodden stench, unless you air out the room.

And these days, there is no fresh place to get atmosphere from.

We are locked in a political outhouse on a hot day, and it gets worse and worse as the temperature rises.

American politics has sunk to a level of corruption not seen since the Reconstruction, or the president whose death made Calvin Coolidge an accidental president, Warren G. Harding.

Don Imus, an earlier crucifee to the concept of “media impartiality” and the echo chamber of our tabloid press now is ON Fox News Business in the mornings, as those who have fostered this climate capitalize on its triumph.

Hell, they’ve even syndicated Dennis Miller, who, were he not being paid for it almost appears, would have faded from the national scene and be doing dinner theater in the Catskills, having hitched his wagon to the Bushian star. No: he’s got a three hour nationally syndicated “talk” radio show where he can inflect “lefties” or “leftists” the way that he used to happily sneer “ratfucking bastards.”

Dennis Miller

But he’s safe. If HE said anything like David Weigel said (on what he had a reasonable expectation of privacy, t’would seem), nobody would raise an eyebrow.

Because, you see, he says stuff like that every week day.

For three hours.

Selling hate and gold.

Sometimes it’s a fine line between Dennis Miller and Zell Miller

David Weigel has paid the price for the aegis of mainstream media in a new media age. But he’ll be back. Aegis or no. (Meantime FishBowl DC is dancing and waving Weigel’s scalp on their memory stick.)

Wouldn’t it be funny if we held Fox News “journalists” and rightie bloggers with Ford and Volkswagen and Hilton Hotels ads on their blogs to the same standard that we insist David Weigel had violated?

Personally I didn’t find anything offensive in this line (that contributed to Weigel’s canning). I found it a Parkeresque witticism:

This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

Of course, that ought to read “if Karl Rove decided.”

Mr. Rove (and his ilk) not only has the floor, but the gutter, as well.

But I wonder whose head gets put on a pike and paraded around the global village next?

Courage.