On May 4, 2010:

What killed President Bush's credibility?  His utter claim that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to search for nuclear weapons.  Because he and his people were dishonest enough to make that claim, he ended up looking like an incompetent when we fought our way into that country and are still fighting our way out, only to find there were no nuclear weapons on hand.

The incompetence became downright staggering when the commander in chief pranced on to an aircraft carrier with that "Mission Accomplished" banner flying overhead.  The bozos couldn't even get the PR right.

Flashback to Chris Matthews on "Mission Accomplished" day (5/1/03):

We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits.

And also a few weeks earlier, when a Saddam Hussein statue was pulled down in Baghdad:

Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today....

We're all neo-cons now....

What's [Howard Dean] going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?

Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg is tired of people picking on Robert Rubin. Sure, his critics to point to his involvement in the financial deregulation of the 1990s and his disastrous tenure at Citibank,  but they're wrong.

At least that's what Weisberg tries to argue in his column "In Defense of Robert Rubin" (5/10/10). Weisberg admits early on that he "helped Rubin write a memoir," but not to worry--this column is all Weisberg.

And he writes: "To me, the most wrong-headed accusation is that Rubin prevented effective regulation during the Clinton years."  This is a false charge because Rubin's "view has always been that the financial system needs to be protected from market excesses. Rubin regarded derivatives as risky because of the way they could magnify market moves and implicate interconnected financial institutions."

OK, that's what he believed; what did he do as Treasury secretary? He helped push deregulatory policies. But Weisberg tells us that that this had a lot to do with the fact that his deputy Larry Summers ridiculed his ideas. It's a rather unconvincing argument.

But the same pattern held during Rubin's tenure at Citigroup, where (according to Weisberg) Rubin had no power over much of anything--hence, the company's spectacular collapse cannot be pinned on him. Weisberg uses a peculiar analogy to drive home his point:

But even with a more conventional kind of authority, it's unrealistic to think he could have prevented the mistakes that necessitated a government bailout of Citi. The assumption that the rating agencies knew their business, a key enabler of the subprime meltdown, is analogous to the view before the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein had WMD. There are a lot of people who now scoff about what an obvious fallacy this was and not many who can point to doubts expressed at the time.

The fact that "not many" elites can claim to have been right about Iraq shouldn't be confused with the fact that there were ample reasons to be skeptical of the Bush administration's WMD claims; it's just that elite media (including Newsweek) tended to ignore or dismiss those facts, and the people who pointed them out. It wasn't hard to find the evidence, though; United Nations weapons inspectors were very visibly failing to find the Iraqi weapons the White House insisted were there.

The corporate media mythology about the Iraq War has long held that no one could have known things that some people did know. Weisberg wants the same standard to apply to the financial meltdown--and particularly to his friend Robert Rubin. Lucky for him he's got a column in Newsweek he can use to make that case.

Glenn Beck says progressives are trying to "fundamentally transform the country" by rendering the Constitution "irrelevant" ("In 1920, they stopped studying the Constitution in law school and started studying case law!"), and by expunging from history the role "religion and morals" played in our founding.

On his April 28 show, Beck announced the launch of Founders Fridays segment, a special feature by which Beck intends to counter these progressive lies with...the truth:

Every Friday is going to be Founders' Fridays on the program, at least for the next month. And if nobody watches, well, then, we'll keep doing it anyway. We are going to try to repair some of the damage that is being done by truth. Truth. Truth is like fire. It will burn. It will burn everything that is impure. It will set on fire all lies. But it will not consume the truth. So we'll set a few fires by spewing the truth.

Don't think that Beck will have to do all this truth-spewing and fire-setting by himself; he'll have help from guests who "have history":

We're going to have some people in here who have history, who know the Founders better than anybody else on Earth. One of the guys who's going to be joining us for some of these is David Barton, author of Original Intent and founder of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes.

In "The Right's Library of Fake Quotes," Extra! (4/10) documents many instances where conservatives have promoted fabricated historical quotes, religious and otherwise:

One of the most prolific purveyors of bogus founder quotes is Christian theocrat David Barton. Though not a household name, Barton's tireless efforts to construct a Christian origin story for the United States have been praised by the likes of Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich (Church & State, 7-8/96). His 1989 book The Myth of Separation attributed bogus quotes to Washington (''It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible''), Jefferson ("I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens") and Patrick Henry ("It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ"). Barton has also misattributed the "Ten Commandments" quote to Madison.

In 1996 Barton admitted that these and nine other quotes he'd been circulating in his writings, videotapes and live appearances were either false or unverifiable (Church & State, 7-8/96). But Barton's reputation suffered little from the fraud, according to Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church & State. "He's doing better than ever," Boston told Extra!, noting that since 1996 Barton has served as vice-chair of the Texas GOP, and now sits on the Texas state committee advising the state's board of education on history and social studies curriculum, "despite no history credentials."

But Barton is no stranger to the show, having appeared several times with Beck in the recent past (e.g. 4/30/10, 4/8/10, 3/15/10.) And Barton has apparently had a real impact on Beck, who repeated one of the spurious George Washington quotes he is famous for promoting on his March 5 show: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

Beck and Barton should thank God that truth doesn't really burn lies.

You just never know what will set Bill O'Reilly off. Last night, it was a perfectly reasonable remark by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who, following the arrest of a Pakistani suspect in the Times Square car bomb plot, cautioned against turning  Pakistanis or followers of Islam into scapegoats:

I want to make clear that we will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers. All of us live in this city. And among any group, there's always a few bad apples.

O'Reilly angrily lashed out at Bloomberg:

Well, maybe somebody should remind the mayor that Muslim fanatics have been threatening New York City and the entire country for almost 20 years. That's a lot of apples out there, sir.

If there is a way to read O'Reilly's response to Bloomberg as anything but a call for "bias and backlash," it eludes us.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly searched around for a reason to support Arizona's harsh new immigration law, and seemed to settle on the fact that there is a crime wave in Phoenix (5/3/10):

Arizona had to do something. In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control. For example, last year New York City-- with six times as many residents as Phoenix--had just 16,000 more reported crimes. San Diego is the same size as Phoenix. It has 60 percent less crime.

There are only three small problems with this explanation.

For one, there's no evidence that immigrants are liable to commit more crimes than anyone else; in fact, most research suggests it's exactly the opposite. So the link between a law to arrest more undocumented immigrants and crime is hard to fathom.

The crime rate in Phoenix has been dropping-- so it's not "out of control" at all.

And O'Reilly's statistical sleight of hand is the other problem. New York City has 16,000 more crimes than Phoenix, but is six times larger. Well, what does that prove?  If O'Reilly were trying to make any sense at all, he'd be talking about per capita crime rates. But making comparisons between cities based on the FBI's crime data is something they explicitly warn people not to do:

Individuals using these tabulations are cautioned against drawing conclusions by making direct comparisons between cities. Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.

And it might be worth mentioning that one of O'Reilly's points here was to attack the "flat-out dishonest" media coverage of the Arizona law.

The formula for "contrarian" journalism was aptly summed up by Wonkette (1/6/09):

Take a widely accepted belief (e.g., "Dogs make good pets") and write a cool 600 words arguing why its opposite is SECRETLY truer ("Why all dogs should die").

Of course, it helps if the upside-down world you're proposing turns out to be one that is surprisingly cozy to powerful corporate interests.  Thus the piece that appeared on the front page of the New York Times today (4/4/10) arguing that maybe we're all a little too worried about that oil spill in the Gulf.

To back up this counterintuitive notion, reporters John Broder and Tom Zeller turn to an "expert":

"The sky is not falling," said Quenton R. Dokken, a marine biologist and the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. "We've certainly stepped in a hole and we're going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn't the end of the Gulf of Mexico."

Who is this "conservation group" minimizing the impact of a massive oil spill on the area it specializes in conserving?  That's what Marian Wang of ProPublica (5/4/10) wondered, too.  Turns out it's not really a conservation group at all:

At least half of the 19 members of the group's board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry.  One of them is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded last month, causing millions of gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico.

Seven other board members are currently employed at oil companies, or at companies that provide products and services "primarily" to the offshore oil and gas industry. Those companies include Shell, Conoco Phillips, LLOG Exploration Company, Devon Energy, Anadarko Petroleum Company and Oceaneering International.

The Gulf of Mexico Foundation's president is a retired senior vice president of Rowan Companies Inc., an offshore drilling contractor.

Meanwhile, Transocean hosted the group's winter board meeting in January and sponsored a dinner for the board of directors. Past board meetings have been hosted in full or in part by Anadarko Petroleum Company, Shell Exploration and Production, Valero Refinery and Marathon Oil Corporation.

So it's not exactly surprising that the executive director of such a group would have a nonchalant view of the impact of oil spills on the Gulf.  What is maybe a little surprising is that the New York Times would present a coalition of offshore drilling interests as neutral experts on the environment.

And it's not like the Times reporters didn't know who they were quoting. In an addendum to her ProPublica piece, Wang quotes an email response from Zeller:

We were aware of GMF's industry partnerships--and for what it's worth, I believe they also have members from the agriculture and fishing industries, among others. As you'll note from Dr. Dokken's bio, the group also includes marine scientists.

You could certainly mount the argument that such co-mingling might influence his assessment of the oil slick and how bad it might get, but as I understand it, the bulk of GMF's operating budget comes from federal and state grants, so that wasn't my sense.

So because the group gets government grants, the Times reporters thought it wasn't worth mentioning that half the group's board represents the very industry whose damage to the Gulf is being minimized?

"Of course, it’s probably always better to err on the side of full disclosure," Zeller tells ProPublica--as if revealing that you're quoting an industry group speaking in its own defense would be bending over backwards--"but we operate within space constraints as well--and I believe we did link out to the various websites, so enterprising readers could peruse their boards and sponsors."

Here's a tip for the Times: Next time you are running into "space constraints," maybe you can free up some room by killing the piece that revolves around an industry spokesperson telling readers not to worry about the damage the industry that employs him has done to the environment.

UPDATE: The New York Times published an Editor's Note on May 5 saying that the article "should have included more information about" the Gulf of Mexico Foundation: "While the group says the majority of its funding comes from federal and state grants, it also receives some money from the oil industry and other business interests in the gulf, and includes industry executives on its board." While few readers--"enterprising" or not--would realize from that additional info that offshore drilling interests represent half the group's board, we suppose it's better than Tom Zeller's response.

It was a surprise to see Afghan feminist activist Malalai Joya on Time magazine's "Top 100 Most Influential People in the World" list. Not as surprising, though, to see her views criticized. Joya is a fierce opponent of the U.S. presence in her country, which does not sit well with some in the corporate media.

Joya's Time entry was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is perhaps best known in this country thanks to U.S. conservatives' embrace of her criticism of Islam.  Her write-up wishes that Joya would learn to love the U.S. occupation.

Malalai, 31, is a leader. I hope in time she comes to see the U.S. and NATO forces in her country as her allies. She must use her notoriety, her demonstrated wit and her resilience to get the troops on her side instead of out of her country. The road to freedom is long and arduous and needs every hand.

Journalist Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed Joya about the Time situation (AlterNet, 5/3/10), and got this response:

I am very angry with the way they have introduced me. Time has painted a false picture of me and does not mention anything at all about my struggle against the occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. and NATO, which is disgusting. In fact, everyone knows that I stand side-by-side with the glorious antiwar movements around the world and have proved time and again that I will never compromise with the U.S. and NATO, who have occupied my country, empowered the most bloody enemies of my people and are killing my innocent compatriots in Afghanistan. What Time did was like giving an award to someone with one hand and getting it back with another hand.

We noted last week that the PBS NewsHour's coverage of the Gulf oil disaster one night included a one-on-one interview with a spokesperson from BP. Going through the show's coverage since then, a remarkable fact emerged: The show had not interviewed an environmental advocate opposed to the White House plan to increase offshore oil drilling. The reticence to talk about this obvious policy angle was bizarre--though not at all limited to PBS.

Well, last night the NewsHour hosted a debate between Greenpeace's Kert Davies and Sara Banaszak of the American Petroleum Institute. So let the record show that the NewsHour has opened up a tiny bit of space for that discussion to happen.

And it's an improvement over the comments by PBS liberal Mark Shields, who on April 30 was lamenting the fact that the current spill might set back the effort to increase offshore drilling: "The resistance on the environmental left to offshore drilling, I think, had diminished at the time the president came forward, because of the advances in safety equipment and strategies."

That wasn't really the case; the environmental groups that opposed offshore drilling continued to oppose it, no matter what Barack Obama thought of the idea. It's good that PBS is letting its viewers in on that now.

Ross Douthat has a New York Times column today (5/3/10) criticizing those who are "impugning the motives" of the new Arizona immigration law, which

has been denounced as a "Nazi" or "near-fascist" law, a "police state" intervention, an imitation of "apartheid," a "Juan Crow" regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

Really, says Douthat, the Arizona law is an understandable if unfortunate response to the federal government's failure to "regain...control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it's been found difficult and left untried."

Douthat is quite vague about what he means by "control." If he has in mind policies that would freeze or slightly reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country, we already have those. But Douthat is trying to present a vision of federal action on immigration that would potentially satisfy the people who pushed for Arizona's law, so clearly he has in mind something more ambitious.

Douthat sketches out what such "control" would mean, including "enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border." Actually, removing a substantial portion of an estimated 11 million people from the United States would require more than cards and walls; more likely, it would involve massive internment camps and forced transport reminiscent of Balkan ethnic cleansing, if not even grimmer historical precedents. Though it's clearly Douthat's intention to propose a kinder, gentler anti-immigration position for the Republican Party, there's no way to do such a thing in a way that could not be described as "draconian" in all fairness.

But it's Douthat's description of the economic measures necessary to secure that border that is most illuminating: "Curbing the demand for illegal workers requires stiff workplace enforcement, stringent penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor." The key phrase here is "shared sacrifice"; Douthat acknowledges, as few people on his side do, that the net effect of forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.

"You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem," Douthat writes. Yes, you can see why politicians don't want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions. What's harder to explain is why some folks would want to do such a thing--explanations that don't involve bigotry, that is.

The New York Times' May 2 Week in Review section leads with a piece from Jad Mouawad headlined "The Spill vs. a Need to Drill." You get a sense of the tone of the piece early on: Readers learn that "emotions are running high" as the disaster gets worse. And this has led to predictable consequences:

Beyond railing at BP, the company that owns the well now spewing oil, some environmental groups have demanded an end to offshore exploration.

If someone's "emotion"-based argument is reduced to "railing," it's obviously not to be taken seriously. The Times states its position pretty succinctly: Nothing is going to stop offshore drilling, for simple reasons:

The country needs the oil--and the jobs.

Much has changed since 1969. The nation's demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.

While it's certainly true that the country consumes more oil now than it did in 1969 (it would be surprising if that weren't the case, since the U.S. population was two-thirds as big as it is today), new drilling would provide a relatively small amount of oil, and would have little impact on the much-discussed need to break the grip of "foreign oil."

The article also offers concern about global warming as a rationale for continued offshore drilling--because allowing such drilling might help win Republican support for a climate bill.

The Times goes on to note that, "Some in the environmental movement believe that public outrage will also push the government to aggressively develop alternatives to oil." This sets up a quote from an environmentalist--which is then challenged by the reporter:

But developing credible, cheap and abundant alternatives to oil will take many decades, and in the meantime, cars need gasoline and planes need kerosene. The United States is still the world’s top oil consumer by far. Even as China grows, the United States consumes twice as much oil.

Is there any alternative, asks Mouawad? Not for decades, says the American Enterprise Institute's Samuel Thernstrom, and in the meanwhile we've got to drill--leaving the last word to the ExxonMobil-backed think tank.