When Total Failure Just Isn't Enough (Plus John McCain's Own Personal Quagmire)

Juan Williams started something a few weeks ago on FoxNews and I hope we see a lot more incidents just like it in the coming months. Williams went after Brit Hume and Bill Kristol for their criticism of Iraq War opponents. Here's what he had to say:

[S]ometimes I just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began. I mean, you don't give credit to people, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Barbara Lee, people who said from the start this is a mistake. You put them down. Now it's everybody's a surrender monkey or impatient or squeamish or weak. Why can't you say, hey, there's a real problem in Iraq?

Williams' comment really hit a nerve with me. People like Bill Kristol were cheerleading the Iraq War before it started. As Eric Alterman noted recently: "Literally no one has been more consistently wrong about Iraq than Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol."

Yet imbeciles like Kristol are still invited back to spew their bullshit ideas with regard to that debacle. Indeed, TIME Magazine just hired Kristol as a "part-time columnist," despite his pathetic track record on Iraq.

A frustrated viewer summed up the problem this way during an online chat with CNN talk show host Howard Kurtz a few weeks ago:

"Why do we keep having people who were wrong on Iraq giving advice on TV? MTP this week had a politician and two Times columnists who have been consistently wrong. Why not have Russ Feingold, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert who were and still are right?"

Those are good questions. Dan Rather's career was ruined because he didn't authenticate certain documents that merely purported to substantiate something that everyone in the world already knew to be true, namely, that George W. Bush deserted his post during the Viet Nam War. If Rather could be drummed out of the business over that, folks like Kristol and others could at least not be invited back to television news shows to talk "authoritatively" about a catastrophe that they helped create.

But this would never happen, because the Corporate Media love the Extreme Right and dislike anyone who speaks out against the regressives. What happened to Senator Obama recently is a great example of this particular bias at work. Media Matters has the goods here:

During MSNBC's special election coverage on November 7, co-anchor Chris Matthews remarked that Obama's "middle name is Hussein" and suggested that it would "be interesting down the road."

On November 27, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson referred to radio host Bill Press as "a true member of the Barack Hussein Obama fan club."

During the November 28 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Republican strategist Ed Rogers referred to "Barack Hussein Obama."

On the December 5 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, senior political correspondent Carl Cameron told viewers: "Though he's written two books about himself already, most people know very little about Barack Hussein Obama Junior's uncommonly privileged life."

CNN is also getting into the act. Wolf Blitzer recently "apologized" for this incident:

During the Jan. 1 broadcast of Wolf Blitzer's nightly news program, a pre-commercial preview of the show's next segment included a story on the hunt for Al Qaeda's leadership. Over a photo of Osama Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Blitzer stated, according to the transcript, "Plus, a new year, but the same mission. Will 2007 bring any new changes in the hunt for Osama bin Laden?"

But instead of asking "Where's Osama?" the graphic over the two Islamists read "Where's Obama?" referencing the surname of popular Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama.

One could overlook this incident on CNN if it was an isolated one. Unfortunately, it was not:

On a Dec. 11 broadcast of Blitzer's show, other moves suggested an effort to sustain a meme on Obama's Islamic links. First, a commentary by Jeff Greenfield asked "Is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does?" and answered, "Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." He thereupon described Obama as a "sartorial timebomb." Greenfield later insisted that his remarks were merely a joke.

On the same broadcast, CNN correspondent Jeanne Moos made the Osama-Obama link. She noted, "Someone could confuse Obama with Osama. Only one little consonant differentiates the two names. And as if that similarity weren't enough, how about sharing the name of a former dictator?"

Instead of reporting on something real, such as potential GOP candidate Rudy Giulani's marital infidelities or his association with the corrupt Bernie Kerik, the media focus on how Obama's name and style of dress are similar to those of certain Middle Eastern extremists. Great reporting, folks.

The bottom line here is that Democrats have a huge disadvantage when it comes to getting favorable coverage from the Corporate Media. Idiots like Bill Kristol will always be given air time, while folks like Frank Rich and Paul Krugman will consistently be ignored even though they were right about Iraq all along.

Given this disadvantage, the Democrats really have to do their own work on this front. That's why I really like what Sen. Edwards did recently. He struck the first blow with regard to the 2008 campaign by referring to Bush's plan to surge troop levels as the McCain Doctrine.

But McCain isn't the only contender for the GOP nomination. Giuliani is also in the running, and the Democrats must start seriously exploiting Guiliani's moderate positions on social issues as well as his aforementioned marital infidelities and connections to Kerick. Remember, Right-Wing Christian Nutjobs have a lot of power during the primaries, and all GOP contenders for president have to go through these extremists in order to get the nomination.

And most of all, the Democrats can't forget about Iraq. Both McCain and Guiliani supported that particular disaster. This must be rammed up them sideways at every opportunity, particularly given that the Bush Regime is currently trying to re-write the history of this catastrophe (from Josh Marshall):

According to the White House, the person to blame for Iraq is Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the top American commander in the country. And Casey's so bad that President Bush is probably going to can him before his current tour concludes this summer. Probably as soon as next month.

In so many words, Casey's policy (which, reading between the lines, it's pretty clear Casey thought was Bush's desired policy) was maintain current troop levels and 'standing down as the Iraqis stand up'. You may have thought that was the Bush policy. But apparently not. "Over the past 12 months," the Times now tells us, "as optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy with General Casey's strategy."

Of course, this is complete horseshit on the part of the Bush Regime. Bush's current surge plan has little to do with military strategy. As a White House official recently admitted, this surge option is "more of a political decision than a military one."

I think Joe Biden got it right when he said this last week:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

Caught in the middle of all this is John McCain. Bush will be out of the picture in a couple years, but McCain is running for president. I kind of feel sorry for him. Well, not really -- but it is funny that he came up with the McCain Doctrine probably because he figured that Bush would choose not to deploy more troops. That way, when Bush begins troop withdrawals and Iraq devolves further into hellishness -- which will happen (there is no easy way out of this particular mess, folks) -- then McCain figured that he could come out in early 2008 and say that BushCo should have followed his plan and actually put more American troops on Iraqi soil.

But now McCain is stuck with his statements concerning escalation, and in effect is stuck in a quagmire of his own creation. In fact, he is currently scrambling to distance himself from Bush by claiming that Bush isn't really following the McCain Doctrine because McCain actually wants to escalate and not surge (i.e., McCain was for the surge before he was against it).

Good luck with that, Senator.