Tom Johnson's blog

In politics as in war, it's a good idea to know your enemy. At Daily Kos, the primary enemies are Republicans, but based on what Kossacks wrote this past week about GOPers, you really can't say they understand them. They spew, rant, and rave about them, even smear them, but "know"...no. Not even close.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Welcome to a new NB feature, in which we'll highlight politically and rhetorically extreme posts of the past week from America's pre-eminent lefty blog, Daily Kos.

This week, Kossacks were most riled up about the now-temporarily-averted federal government shutdown, Paul Ryan's budget proposal, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Each quotation is preceded by the blogger's name (or, more typically, pseudonym).

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

Arianna Huffington isn't happy with the sort of political coverage in which reporters act as "stenographer[s] to the campaign[s]" and "the conventional wisdom gets passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert." As a result, she and her lefty blog site, the Huffington Post, are collaborating with liberal NYU professor Jay Rosen on Off the Bus.net, which Arianna describes as an "exciting new citizen journalism project" that will look at the '08 presidential campaign "from a wide range of different angles and perspectives."

That nod to diversity aside, it's almost certain that OTB will lean left, as the recent hiring of Amanda Michel to run the project would seem to indicate. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Michel worked for Howard Dean and then for John Kerry.

If you think that America, our strategic and tactical mistakes aside, still clearly holds the moral high ground in the war on terror, well, think again, contends Gary Kamiya in the leftist online magazine Salon.

Kamiya believes that in the "war on terror" -- his quotation marks, not mine -- we're actually like one Mafia family that's fighting a turf battle with another, and that this "moral ambiguity" explains in part the popularity of HBO's The Sopranos, the last episode of which ran this past Sunday night.

Oh, and another thing: George W. Bush is driving us crazy. "Quiet violence and repressed mayhem," Kamiya writes, "haunt our own oh-so-respectable lives," and 

The distinctly liberal Dan Froomkin writes the "White House Briefing" column for the Washington Post's web site. Here, in its entirety, is the last item in Froomkin's Friday column:

How long did your New Year's Resolutions last?

Bush's didn't make it a day.

Bush was telling reporters last week about how his thoughts were with the troops when he volunteered: "People always ask me about a New Year's resolution -- my resolution is, is that they'll be safe. . . . "

The Department of Defense reports: "Sgt. Thomas E. Vandling Jr., 26, of Pittsburgh, Pa., died Jan. 1 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle while on combat patrol."

In his profile of John McCain for the February issue of Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum notes that "the constituency that McCain sometimes jokingly refers to as his base" is -- wait for it -- "the press." 

Purdum goes on to acknowledge in so many words that McCain's remark, regardless of how humorously he delivered it, expresses the basic truth that reporters tend to be fans of Arizona's senior senator, which in turn may explain why, during a recent visit to Wisconsin, McCain defended the media's coverage of the Iraq war:

[T]hat afternoon, at a roundtable with more Republicans in Appleton, McCain gets testy with a woman who says that her grandson and granddaughter have served in Iraq and that things there are going better than the American media say.

The New York Post's Page Six column reports that well-traveled television news executive (and longtime Bill Clinton pal) Rick Kaplan may join CBS News:  

RICK Kaplan, the veteran network news exec who most recently ran MSNBC, is rumored to be coming to CBS News to help boost Katie Couric's ratings on the "Evening News." After a brief stint on top of the ratings when she launched in September, Couric has been mired in third place, right where Bob Schieffer was and where Dan Rather was before him. Kaplan...has been unemployed since Dan Abrams replaced him last summer at MSNBC. CBS News denies Kaplan is coming aboard, but the buzz goes on.

Professional golfer Jerry Kelly isn't pleased with the media's coverage of the Iraq war. Neither is a U.S. soldier with whom Kelly spoke while the Madison, Wisconsin-based pro, along with fellow PGA tour members Corey Pavin, Howard Twitty, Frank Lickliter, and Donnie Hammond, recently spent eight days in Iraq under the auspices of the USO.  

Kelly was interviewed about the trip by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel golf writer Gary D'Amato, whose story ran in Saturday's paper. Highlights:

The golfers visited 14 bases in Iraq, entertaining the troops with golf exhibitions and swapping stories with soldiers in conversations that stretched into the early morning hours...

In advance of his lecture last week at Montreal's McGill University, left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh, now best known for reporting on the Iraq war for the New Yorker, gave an interview to the weekly Montreal Mirror:

"I mean, Americans are pretty f---ing ignorant. What we don’t know is pretty huge. You could never accuse Americans of learning from history or learning from past mistakes...What we don’t know is just breathtaking in my country. To call this ignorance wilful as opposed to general ignorance, I don’t know. On any issue, Americans can display an incredible lack of information. I doubt if there’s a society which has paid less attention to the facts than any else."

The following analysis by author and former Bush 43 White House speechwriter David Frum, which he posted Thursday in his blog on National Review Online under the title "The Cry Baby Party," may express what plenty of NewsBusters readers have sensed during this election campaign (bold-type emphasis has been added):

Let me see if I understand the rules of American politics in 2006:

It's in bounds to write a deliberately deceptive voter initiative to try to inscribe embryo-killing research into a state's law.

It's in bounds for a likeable and suffering celebrity to suggest that such research is poised to deliver a cure that will help him - despite the utter absence of evidence for any such claim.

Camille Paglia, cultural scholar and maverick liberal Democrat, has given a politically themed interview to the left-wing online magazine Salon in which she touches on some media issues. (HT: National Review Online's Hot Links.)

Previously, Paglia has readily acknowledged that liberal media bias exists, and that it's hardly a new phenomenon; she's said that Barry Goldwater was the target of a "vicious media assault" during the 1964 presidential campaign.

In the Salon interview, Paglia argues that the media and Democrats were guilty of "gargantuan overkill" in their treatment of the Mark Foley matter, but that the excessive coverage actually wound up being a "tremendous boon" to President Bush because it distracted the public from the Iraq war.

Whenever a writer for one of America's most influential newspapers states his or her opinions about liberal media bias, it should be brought to the attention of NewsBusters readers (unless, of course, said writer merely offers some variant of the lame, threadbare "we get complaints from both the right and the left, which tells me our coverage is balanced" argument).

Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten also occasionally writes long pieces for the paper's Sunday magazine. In a Monday web chat concerning Weingarten's admiring profile of Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau, a questioner charged that the Post ran that story and others in order to help the Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. In today's chat, when the same questioner posted a good-humored follow-up, Weingarten addressed media bias in general terms (emphasis added):

Dan Rather, who may have been out to rain on Katie Couric's parade, promote his return to TV news, or both, talked at length the other day to Rebecca Dana of the New York Observer, and the result is in the Observer's new issue. Highlights:

--Starting October 24, the hour-long Dan Rather Reports will air Tuesday nights on the high-definition channel HDNet, whose boss, Mark Cuban, has, in Dana's words, "promised [Rather] complete editorial control of the program." Rather also will do a documentary for HDNet every so often.

Dana writes that Rather "declined to say whether he himself hoped to pursue the mysterious National Guard documents that formed the basis of the [Memogate] report. Instead, he outlined three areas of coverage that he plans to focus on...the lives of soldiers and their families; the shrinking of the middle class (“although I don’t like to talk in terms of class; it’s a European term”); and the relationship between money and political campaigns...All three are topics that he believes are under-covered by the broadcast and cable news operations..."

RadarOnline.com is reporting that Mary Mapes, the driving force behind what became CBS News's Memogate scandal, has reunited with her old pal Dan Rather. (Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg in the Corner.)

From the Radar item:

Good news, phony document fans! The team that gave you Memogate is back in action.

Former CBS News producer Mary Mapes has rejoined her old running partner Dan Rather at Mark Cuban's HDNet channel. Rather, 74, is starting all over at hi-def cable network with a weekly one-hour show that will translate the day's events into awkwardly-worded homespun similes. It debuts in October...

Robert Christgau, whose title, "the dean of American rock critics," was self-bestowed but nonetheless widely accepted, was one of eight staffers let go last week at the Village Voice. In a note posted on Gawker.com, Christgau announced, "Since I have no intention of giving up rock criticism, all reasonable offers [will be] entertained." (HT: Romenesko.)

The 64-year-old Christgau has published two books' worth of essays and, since 1969, a monthly Consumer Guide column, which in its classic form during the 1970s and '80s offered dense-but-readable one-paragraph reviews and A-plus-through-E-minus letter grades for roughly twenty albums per installment.

Christgau's politics, left but not hard-left, often cropped up in his writing. He summarized his leanings a few years ago to RockCritics.com: "I want to see a radical redistribution of wealth and an end to racism, sexism, and homophobia. But that won't make me pretend there's anything inherently communist or socialist about rock and roll -- at its inception, it was an expression of democracy at its American best and capitalism at its entrepreneurial best...Revolutionaries tend to be puritans. Rock and rollers tend not to be. I prefer rock and rollers. And I've always argued that one reason revolutionaries start so few revolutions is that puritans are a pain in the ass."

On this long holiday weekend, let's take a short break from looking at the media's political bias and instead examine the possibility of their sports bias. In the past month, two columnists for ESPN's web site have suggested that when the sports media cover the steroid issue, they tend to come down considerably harder on major-league baseball than they do on the NFL.  In early August, ESPN.com baseball columnist Jerry Crasnick wrote that 

with the continued fallout from the BALCO scandal, baseball is receiving a huge -- and some might say, disproportionate -- share of attention as the whipping boy for performance enhancing drugs. While the stray Floyd Landis or Justin Gatlin might seize the headlines temporarily as sports' resident cheater du jour, it's a virtual lock that the focus will eventually drift back to baseball.

Just for fun, we Googled the words "Bud Selig" and "steroids" and came up with 263,000 matches. A similar search for departing NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue yielded a mere 33,900 matches...