I’ve written a bit about Lara Logan’s dreadful 60 Minutes segment on Benghazi and how it has been shown to be totally wrong. But Digby puts it all in historical context, Lara Logan in her own words 10/2/2012. It seems that just one month after the attack, Logan was ranting about it. Her response to the attack brings back nightmares of 2002. In reference to the government sending FBI agents to investigate, she said, “I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.” [My emphasis. -FM]

It would seem that Logan is not exactly objective, especially in reference to this issue. In fact, she sounds very much like John McCain who seems to think every real or imagined attack on the United States should be responded to by attacking Iran. “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.” There is nothing wrong with having opinions. Everyone has opinions, and I think we get worse reporting with this pretense of objectivity. But the situation is especially bad here. Logan looks like she would be a perfect fit at Fox News. And on this story, it was a perfect storm of bias and laziness. Digby explains:

This was well on display Friday on CBS This Morning when Logan officially apologized for the report. One of the hosts, Norah O’Donnell, asks, “How did you vet [Dylan Davies, the basis of the whole story]?” It’s actually a really good question coming from a morning fluff show. Even still, Logan must have known it was coming. But her response was terrible. “We verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was—that he was working for the State Department at the time—that he was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack… He gave us access to communications he had with the US government officials… We used US government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story. And everything checked out!”

This is all just a defensive way of saying that she had a preexisting narrative that Davies fit, so she believed him. But notice the great Dick Cheney trick that is going on here. This was something Cheney did in the lead up to the Iraq War. His staff would leak information to the New York Times, which would print it. Then Cheney would do an interview where he talked about the very same “intelligence.” And to bolster his case, he would say, “It’s not just me; the liberal New York Times just reported the same thing.” In this case, Logan had a narrative based on the Republican show hearings going on at the House of Representatives. Everyone knows about those, most especially the guy who is writing a book that is trying to leverage those hearings for a quick buck. So we have an echo chamber that Logan thought was independent confirmation. Or at least that’s what she said happened.

The truth is that I don’t believe Lara Logan was especially trying to push her conservative narrative. She was just looking for a great old-style 60 Minutes scoop. The truth is that the show is mostly useless anymore. Their other big scoop recently was how disability fraud was killing us. That too was just another Republican talking point whipped up into a story of outrage. Since the show doesn’t seem to care much about journalism anymore, they might as well go for eye candy. And Logan is as close as they get to it.

Update (10 November 2013 3:38 pm)

Jay Rosen wrote an excellent timeline of the CBS response, Will CBS News Apologize for the Reckless Denials Before its Benghazi Story Collapsed? He brings up one especially good point:

Even worse, for about a week after the segment aired, Lara Logan claimed that the reason people were raising questions was because of the politicized atmosphere. Of course, her report was the reason that the Benghazi story came roaring back.

Update (10 November 2013 7:57 pm)

At the end of 60 Minutes, Lara Logan came on for roughly two minutes with a “correction.” All she mentioned was the questions about Davies. Nothing was said about the conflict of interest between the book publisher and CBS. And nothing was said about CBS’s stonewalling for almost two weeks as more and more questions were raised. She also made it sound like just one person in the report was misleading. Nothing was said about the fact that he was the whole thing or that the other two interviewed for the episode were well know hacks who have been everywhere making the same claims. As little as I think of 60 Minutes, I’m still shocked at just how poorly they handled this “correction.”

Ed Kilgore has been following an interesting bit of demographics from Tuesday’s election, More on VA and the African-American Vote That Saved Terry McAuliffe. In comparing the 2009 election where the Republicans in the top spots won big, the 2013 electorate looks the same. Except: the turn out of African American voters was very high: more like the 2012 election. And this is the only reason that Terry McAuliffe will be the next governor of Virginia. Both Asians and Latinos voted at their 2009 levels.

The question is why this is and the truth is that no one knows. But Kilgore mentions a tantalizing possibility, “I’ve heard a few random folk cite the pre-election voter purge executed by Virginia as a provocation to black voters.” Ah yes. I talked about this a few months back with regard to Ross Douthat’s idea that Voter ID laws will, in the end, hurt Republicans. Given the southern history of voter suppression, African Americans especially will push back hard. It is one thing to not vote in an election where all the candidates are losers. It is quite another thing when people are actively trying to stop you from voting for those losers. And guess who they’ll vote for? The Democratic loser!

Or it could be that African Americans are just really pissed off. After all, this recession has hurt them far more than it has whites. As usual. That is a cheery thought: the poor might be coming to terms with the fact that we may not have money or individual power, but together through the profound act of voting we are the most powerful entity in the nation. The interesting thing is that as a group, African Americans don’t want that much—mostly just a reasonable chance at a decent life. Meanwhile, conservatives are obsessed by the thought that the government will have to pay reparations for slavery. That is how big a gulf there is between the thinking of the poor and the rich. Clearly, being rich does not generate clarity of thought.

Throughout American history, there has been a balance between the direct power of the rich and the electoral power of the poor. It has moved one way and then the other. But for the last 35 years, we have seen the pendulum swing toward the rich. Now we are at a point where income inequality is as bad as it has ever been. The time for the pendulum to swing back the other direction is long overdue.

Regardless of the reason that African Americans voted in large numbers in this off-off-year election, it is a good thing. And I hope that it is part of a trend. This nation has long been held back by conservative gains in off-year elections. The American people are center-left. The Democratic Party is center. The American voter is slightly center-right. And the Republican Party far right. Anything that makes the voting public more like the actual public is a very good thing.

I just thought of something while reading Patricia Murphy’s excellent article, Why National Democrats Rolled Over for Chris Christie. As I’ve complained about before, President Obama did not endorse Barbara Buono in the New Jersey’s governor’s race. I’ve heard it said that Obama did that as a kind of payback for Christie’s behavior during Hurricane Sandy right before the 2012 presidential election. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

But here’s the thing. Christie quite pointedly said at that time that Romney has his man and that he still thought that Romney was the better man for the job than Obama. So why is it that Obama didn’t endorse Buono? Not doing so says that he doesn’t have a preference. Or not much of one. And that may be! Christie’s economic conservatism and social moderation may be exactly what Obama thinks.

I know: the standard line is that Obama is a real liberal but the Republicans just won’t allow him to govern that way. He’s against taking money away from the old and food away from the poor. It is just all those nefarious advances and pools that stop him from doing what he thinks is right! But I really question that narrative. In fact, I know it’s not true. It isn’t that Obama is secretly conservative. I don’t really know. But he definitely leans conservative on economic issues and is too spineless to lead on liberal social issues. This is a man who would have felt right at home in Reagan’s cabinet. And, I mean, that man was forced into supporting same sex marriage by that liberal firebrand Joe Biden!

So it is telling that Obama couldn’t even bother to endorse Buono. She is hardly a liberal firebrand herself. But it could be that Obama finds himself exactly halfway between her and the extremist conservative policies of Christie. Or it could be that he is just a political amateur who somehow thinks he owes Christie something. Or it could be that Obama doesn’t now and never has given half a shit about the Democratic Party outside of his own legacy. Or it could be some combination of all three.

Regardless of the reason, Obama’s lack of a Buono endorsement is unforgivable. And the funny thing is that he seems to do all of his work to shore up his reputation as a bipartisan leader who is the “adult in the room.” He wants people to look back on him like they now look back on Clinton and Reagan. But it ain’t gonna happen. People look back fondly on those presidents because the economies were really good when they left office. When Obama leaves office the economy will at best be continuing to struggle ahead. When most people look back on him, they will think, “Meh.” When people like me look back on him, we will think of him as a guy who talked pretty but wasn’t nearly as liberal as he claimed. We will regret the great opportunity cost of his presidency. And we will despise him for not giving a shit about the party that he ostensibly led.

I am fascinated with the media coverage of Venezuela. I discussed it about a week ago when talking about the new Slate feature, If It Happened There… The idea of it is to report news about America as we would report it if it were happening elsewhere. The problem is that it matters very much where that elsewhere is. Is it Israel where it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s totally great? Or is it Venezuela where it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s totally awful?

Most of the recent coverage of Venezuela is like the article in Business Insider, A Few Bizarre Anecdotes That Show Venezuela Is at the Edge of a Dangerous Precipice. Things are going terribly wrong in Venezuela because for most reporters in America, something is always going terribly wrong in Venezuela. They will wait a hundred years if necessary so that they can finally say, “Told you!”

But the last year really has been bad for Venezuela. During that time, the cost of living went up 49%. But this doesn’t mean that hyperinflation is on the way. The Venezuelan government has things in order. (Amusingly, the Business Insider article claimed, “It can’t be stressed enough—[Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro] is no Chavez.” As if the website was a champion of Chavez!) Mark Weisbrot explains the situation:

But here’s the thing: during this same period, poverty in Venezuela has been cut by 20%. This is in addition to drastic decreases in poverty over the last decade. So the inflation is not hurting poor people. Inflation tends to primarily hurt exactly the people who American media listen to: the rich.

Given the news on Venezuelan poverty is and has been good, what choice does the mainstream press of this country have? None at all! So they simply don’t report it. But if Venezuela were doing as bad a job on this issue as the United States, you can be sure that it would get major coverage. Here’s a graph of our poverty rate:

Notice how its been pretty much increasing over the last 40 years thanks to Republicans and New Democrats. Compare it to Venezuea:

That’s the difference between the “beyond the pale” radicals in Venezuela and the Very Serious establishment types in the United States. When the status quo is wrong, the sober managers are evil.

This doesn’t help. Over on Wonk Blog, Sarah Kliff caught my attention with the headline, Uh-oh: Techies Are Finding New Problems With HealthCare.gov. But there was exactly nothing of importance in the 200 word article. And what is the big news? The team located problems further down the user experience path.

Kliff claims that “they didn’t know about” these new problems. Well, yeah. When they started on the project they didn’t know about the vast majority of problems. The hard part of fixing computer code is not the actual fixing; it is the finding. I’m sure that the people working on HealthCare.gov suspected that they would run into problems further into the process. I’m sure that when they estimated completing the fix by the end of the month they weren’t basing that on fixing just the problems they were currently working on.

What is going on is actually good news. As the developers are fixing problems with the website, they are allowing users to get further into the process. This, in turn, is allowing them to run up against problems further in. In other words: the website is becoming more usable. New problems have become apparent. Now the developers are working on these newly found problems.

This is all about framing. The Wonk Blog article could have been headlined, “Progress Made on HealthCare.gov as Developers Move to Previously Hidden Bugs.” But I guess the scare headline generates more clicks. I’ve watched as Wonk Blog has tried to burnish its nonpartisan credibility by hammering away at the healthcare website. But this one is just a cheap shot. Although new problems have been found, the developers claim that it does not change their timeline.

Sarah Kliff can “uh-oh” all she likes. But the fact is that finding bugs is what the developers are there to do. If they weren’t still finding problems it would either mean that the problems were overblown or the developers weren’t doing their jobs. And we know the problems weren’t overblown.

No one knows Wisconsin like John Nichols, so when I got a tweet from him, I clicked over, The Scott Walker Effect: Helping Democrats Win and Republicans Lose. It has a lot of fun details about the big rally that Walker did with Ken Cuccinelli that only managed to attract about 150 supporters. That was the weekend before the election! But it isn’t exactly news. Republicans tend to have difficulty getting people to their events because so few people actually like them. They would be better off holding events at abortion clinic protests and corporate boardrooms; that’s where their supporters will be found.

What most struck me in the article was this sentence, “Walker was not invited for a final weekend surrogate swing in New Jersey to campaign for Republican Governor Chris Christie.” That’s not surprising; Scott Walker is not popular anywhere, and certainly not in New Jersey. But the thing is, there is no real difference between Walker and Christie on policy. What’s there is around the edges. For example, Walker is a climate change denier. Christie is not. But Christie’s affirmation of climate change has been so weak as to be useless.

The main thing is that when it comes to workers and their rights, there is no daylight between Walker and Christie. All that nonsense of Christie yelling at teachers is not just about him being an asshole to people generally. He hates teachers because, like pretty much any conservative anywhere in this country, he hates teachers unions. It can’t be said enough: the only difference between the Republicans who are supposedly beyond the pale and those who are “mainstream” is how they talk and not what they think. If Christie could, he would destroy all unions, but he’s smart enough to know you don’t say such things.

Nichols wrote another article yesterday, Don’t Get Too Excited About Christie’s Politics of Style, Not Substance. It follows along with what I’ve been saying. The people of New Jersey don’t agree with Christie on much of anything. And that was highlighted Tuesday when the people voted in the same numbers for a new minimum wage law that Christie was very much opposed to. But I’m not sure that the issue with Christie is his great style. It is more that a narrative has been accepted about him that he is one of those reasonable Republicans who was there during Hurricane Sandy and so he ought to be rewarded.

Regardless, Nichols is right on about how Christie’s “style” (such as it is) will play outside the Goodfellas state. In reference to all the media personalities who are swooning over Christie, he writes, “Just do what Chris Christie says and talk about Chris Christie—at least until his ridiculous reach for the Republican presidential nomination crashes and burns after he yells at the first teacher in Iowa.” Of course, that may not happen. I’m sure there will be many advisers around Christie for the next couple of years trying to mold him into a presentable candidate. But I don’t see how he does this while maintaining his claim to being a “tell it like it is” politician.

I don’t actually care about Christie as a politician. I fully expect him to self-immolate long before he becomes president. But I’m very interested in Christie as exemplar of the “reasonable” or bipartisan Republican. There isn’t anything reasonable or bipartisan about him. What he is instead is a corrupt politician who does very well in a corrupt political system. Richard Daley was really good at that same thing. But reporters were smart enough to never call him “reasonable” or bipartisan. And the voters were smart enough to never call him president. I think the voters are still that smart.

Since early yesterday, I’ve been wanting to talk about Rob Ford’s admission that he smoked crack cocaine. But before I get to that, I want to clarify something. Ford is a terrible human being. He represents everything that is wrong with conservatism. In addition to everything else—but this is core—he shows no empathy for others. But I have a lot of empathy for him. I’m sure you’ve seen the video of him where he goes back to throw a football and then falls down. Or just look through Gawker’s 39 Breathtaking Photos of North America’s Most Photogenic Mayor. Despite everything, he’s most clearly a loser who doesn’t fit in anywhere.

So the fact that he gets shitfaced every night is hardly surprising. And as we all know, when you are shitfaced, you tend to do things you would not normally do: take illegal drugs, sleep with your sister-in-law, run for mayor of Toronto. So I’m more than willing to believe that Rob Ford only smoked crack once that he can remember. And I don’t doubt that he is not a crack addict, although some people want to define the use of any non-approved drug as addiction. He might want to get some help on the drinking or, you know, just cut back a bit. That’s up to him.

People have claimed that he lied before, but he didn’t. I remember thinking when the scandal first broke, “These guys are asking the wrong questions.” What does it even mean to ask Ford if he was a crack addict? That’s at best a value judgement. It seemed strange that I never heard anyone ask him the very simple question, “Have you ever smoked crack?” (Someone might have yelled it at some point, but I didn’t hear it.) Even yesterday, the question was, “Do you smoke crack cocaine?” Well, Ford had to finesse that question to make the admission he wanted. Because if he has only smoked crack once a year ago, then he does not, in fact, “smoke” cocaine; he “smoked” cocaine. I would think reporters would be smarter about this kind of stuff.

I don’t really see the outrage here. Let’s suppose he is telling the truth and he only did crank that one time. It’s a problem because it is a felony. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty minor. It’s not even up there with Eliot Spitzer going to prostitutes multiple times. And it is hard to see how it hurt his job performance. But the constant drinking? That seems far worse. The man has been making law in at least some state of inebriation. But as long as it never ended in a night of crack smoking, the media didn’t care. That strikes me as very messed up.

Look, I understand why the comedians are all over this. For one thing, can anyone watch Rob Ford for more than a minute and not think, “Hey, he’s a lot like Chris Farley!” But you know, Chris Farley if he had been drunk all the time. And the story is delicious. I think Stephen Colbert did a particularly good job of it:

But for the rest of us, I think a certain amount of understanding is in order. And I say this knowing full well that if the situation were reversed, Rob Ford would show me no such understanding. But that’s the thing about liberals: we’re better people. Conservatives should be restricted to work that doesn’t require empathy. Things like accounting and garbage collection. But the fact of the matter is that Rob Ford is just a very famous person who is being tarred by our ridiculous and hypocritical beliefs about drugs. And in that way, he is no less deserving of our sympathy than anyone else.

Afterword

For the record, I don’t buy that Rob Ford only smoked crack that one time. The video of that one time was available? And what about the people he was with? They didn’t look like his normal drinking buddies. But it doesn’t really matter to me. Toronto needs a new mayor, but not because of his crack smoking.

If I told you that that the police pulled over a guy for a minor traffic violation and then drug him off to a hospital for anal probes, you would probably tell me I told you about that yesterday. But you would be operating under the illusion that this doesn’t happen all the time in America. We have another story!

Okay, it didn’t happen again, it happened before. The same police force used the same untrained drug dog to drag an innocent man to the same hospital outside the court’s jurisdiction for anal probing. There are really only two differences. First, it was innocent citizen Timothy Young this time instead of innocent citizen David Eckert. Second, the traffic violation was a turn without a signal instead of an incomplete stop.

The bad part about this is that in the end, all the blame will probably go to the K-9 named Leo. Of course, I’m not buying it. Let’s suppose that poor old Leo starts barking at a drivers seat. Leave aside the whole question of why Leo was brought out to sniff around. (Was Young also clenching his buttocks?) After he does that, they take the driver to the hospital and thoroughly examine his anal cavity. No drugs are found. Doesn’t this make them think that leveraging minor traffic stops into major anal probes might be a bad idea?

But here’s the thing. I don’t think these are unfortunate accidents or mistakes. My understanding is that bringing out the drug dogs requires its own reasonable suspicion. So these guys are taking what sound like pretexts for stops: not signaling and not coming to a complete stop. Then they coming up with a pretext for the dog: clenched buttocks?! And then they are using the dog as a pretext to go to a hospital and go absolutely search crazy.

It looks like fewer procedures were done on Young than on Eckert. This may indicate that the officers were freaking out at the prospect of yet another negative on their anal probing. But really! What kind of a person jumps from a traffic stop to “You got drugs up your butt!” Because that seems to be what’s going on here. I’ll be watching this situation closely. Just with what we know now, this is beyond the pale.