Sometimes the premise of an article is just all wrong. Like this from Monday's New York Times (see bold):

As Republicans See a Mandate on Budget Cuts, Others See Risk

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON -- In Congress and in statehouses, Republican lawmakers and governors are claiming a broad mandate from last year’s elections as they embark on an aggressive campaign of cutting government spending and taking on public unions. Their agenda echoes in its ambition what President Obama and Democrats tried after winning office in their own electoral wave in 2008.

They're talking particularly about the battle in Wisconsin to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers under the guise of budget cutting and fiscal discipline. What comparable steps did Democrats take after 2008? End the Afghan War? No, they dramatically escalated it. Push for the Employee Free Choice Act in order to help bolster the ranks of the labor movement? Nope. Enact aggressive, far-reaching Wall Street reform in order to take advantage of widespread public outrage? Nope. Massive jobs program to counter horrendous unemployment? No. There were few signs that the Democratic leaders and the White House ever much considered such steps. Healthcare is the only legislative item that might make sense here--a bill that, in many respects, borrowed from Republican Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts.

The point of these articles is to warn about partisan "overreach," the need for bipartisanship, and so on. But they often have to start with a false premise--that the major parties behave in the same way, playing to their respective bases. They do not.

A New York Times profile (1/8/11) of author/economist Robert Reich was headlined "Obama the Centrist Irks a Liberal Lion." It's hard not to see where reporter Michael Powell comes down in the debate over Democrats moving to the right:

Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from the comparison. Confronted with a muscular Republican majority in the House in 1994, Mr. Clinton mastered triangulation, which is to say he sailed into a sea neither Republican nor Democratic. It was a strategic masterstroke, but he threw overboard some liberal founding stones.

It's hard to know what is meant by a term like "strategic masterstroke." Obviously Bill Clinton was re-elected; whether voters were responding to Clinton's supposed drift to the right is much more debatable. (The economy improved from 1994 to 1996, which is likely to have been more important.) In any event, Clinton-style centrism did the Democratic Party no favors. As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen wrote (L.A. Times, 4/9/00):

While Clintonism may be good for Bill and Hillary and Al--all of whom seem willing to say or do anything to win the next election--it's worth asking whether Clintonism is good for the Democratic Party.

Let's do the numbers. When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures.

The Democrats under Clintonism resemble a house of cards, with the Clintons and Gore inhabiting the White House atop a party structure crumbling because of an ever-shifting foundation.

On CBS's Face the Nation (1/9/11), host Bob Schieffer declared:

Democracy's arguments have never been pretty, but technology has changed the American dialogue because we can now know of problems instantly. We expect answers immediately and when we don't get them, we let everyone know in no uncertain terms. We scream and shout, hurl charges without proof. Those on the other side of the argument become not opponents but enemies. Dangerous inflammatory words are used with no thought of consequence.

Schieffer singled out one exceptional political leader: "In an eloquent statement, the new Republican House Speaker John Boehner said yesterday's attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve."  To which Schieffer added, "We must change the atmosphere in which this happened and we can begin by remembering that words have consequence. Like all powerful things, they must be used carefully."

While Schieffer sings Boehner's praises, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone (1/5/11)  recalled a different type of Boehner moment:

Another Ohio Democrat, Steve Driehaus, clashed repeatedly with Boehner before losing his seat in the midterm elections. After Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, Driehaus "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town," Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house. Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.

"I didn't think it was funny at all," Driehaus says. "I've got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, 'John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.'"

Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn't think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. "But it's not about what he intended — it's about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work."

Driehaus says Boehner was "taken aback" when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: "He said something along the lines of, 'You know that's not what I meant.' But he didn't apologize."

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Last night on Fox News (12/22/10), Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly attempted to defend GOP opposition to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, which would provide health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

In his final broadcast of the year (12/16/10), Comedy Central's Jon Stewart devoted the entire show to lambasting the Republican opposition. Stewart's attention to the issue seems to have pushed other media outlets to pay attention to this issue. (With any luck, we'll remember this the next time there's a "debate" about people watching a comedy show instead of "real" news.)

Rove and O'Reilly's defense of GOP intransigence is hardly worth recounting. What was notable was their suggestion that Jon Stewart suspiciously developed an interest in this story just last week:

ROVE: But look, where was Mr. Stewart earlier this year--

O'REILLY: He didn't know about it.

ROVE: --when they weren't doing voodoo diddly squat to move this through? Where was the president of the United States?

O'REILLY: Look, look, look--you know the answers to these questions. You know the answer to these questions. They're demagoguing the issue now.

ROVE: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: Because they've squeezed it into a corner where they want to pass it tomorrow.

This is, unsurprisingly, false. Stewart did a report on the health bill in August (8/4/10), when he blasted Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the failure to pass the bill--leading him to declare about the political process,  "I give up."  You can watch it here. And send it to Bill O'Reilly while you're at it (oreilly@foxnews.com).

On yesterday's Chris Matthews show on NBC, the assembled journalists all seem to agree that Barack Obama's decision to cut a tax deal with Republicans and come out swinging against the left was great news. Time's Mike Duffy: "These liberals may scream, but they've been screaming about Barack Obama since the beginning. This isn't anything new."

Chris Matthews and NBC's Andrea Mitchell went back and forth about whether this was an actual "Sister Souljah moment" or a "mini moment." But Helene Cooper of the New York Times summed up the conventional wisdom best:

I think President Obama just had a really good week. If you just look at the trajectory of how this week started, on Monday and Tuesday everybody is writing, everybody's talking about he caved in to Republicans. By Wednesday he's out there, he's gone and done this press conference and he's looking very much as if he's standing up to his own party. He's moved towards the independents. He's being, you know, he's very much appealing to the independents that he's going to need in 2012. And now he sees he--we're writing about him standing up to Democrats. And for him that's exactly the place that he wants to be right now at this stage in his presidency.

As Peter Hart noted earlier, New York Times political reporter Matt Bai has a piece today (12/1/10) critical of Barack Obama for being "loath to publicly disown his base." Bai writes of Obama: "Since he isn't willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the left."

You know, when your chief of staff refers to progressives as "fucking retarded," your press secretary denounces the "professional left" and your senior adviser says that such critics are "insane";  when your vice president tells the left to "stop whining" and you yourself urge them to "wake up"--I'd say you've broken rather publicly with liberals.

Presumably all this hippie-bashing is mainly done for the benefit of journalists like Matt Bai.  It's a shame he wasn't paying attention.

Beware: The dean of the D.C. press corps is disappointed.

In his Washington Post column today ("Dodgeball for Democrats," 11/18/10), David Broder leads off with this:

When the rules of the House of Representatives forced the Democrats to confront a painful choice among their leaders, they did what Democrats are often inclined to do. They changed the rules.

Usually, such a stunt would matter only to the members affected by the change. But this one sends a dangerous signal at a crucial moment, when both parties are being tested on their willingness to respond to the lessons of the last election. This is a disquieting development.

Egad! What was this disquieting stunt that the rule-breaking Democrats pulled off? As Broder explains, losing the Congressional majority normally means losing one leadership position (majority leader); so the party would have a minority leader, a whip and a chair. But since Pelosi is staying on to serve as minority leader, the Democrats have four leaders for three positions. So Pelosi created a position called "assistant leader" in order to keep veteran African-American lawmaker James Clyburn in a leadership role.

I know, I am as outraged as you by this "dangerous" rule-breaking. Funny thing is, a few days prior something very similar was  happening on the Republican side. The new Republican majority, facing leadership challenges from Tea Party-backed lawmakers,  created two new positions for incoming freshmen.

Does any of this actually matter much? Not to most people. But David Broder isn't most people; while he acknowledges that this wouldn't make a difference in normal times, these are certainly not normal times:

But we are about to start a Congress in which everything depends on the willingness of the leadership in both parties to face up to hard choices--on the budget, Afghanistan and a dozen other issues.

Too often in the past, Democrats have avoided making hard choices by throwing more money in the pot or taking similar self-indulgent steps. When it came to the stimulus legislation and health-care reform, for example, Democrats spent to buy votes rather than make tough choices.

The Democrats' unwillingness to face the hard choice in this internal fight sends exactly the wrong signal.

You see, it's not really about what James Clyburn's job title is at all. Democrats are "self-indulgent" money-wasters who "buy votes"--though the examples Broder cites (health care and stimulus) were instances where the party, in an effort to attract Republican and/or Blue Dog support, trimmed their sails, winding up with a stimulus package many thought was too small and a healthcare plan that lacked a public option or a serious effort to control drug costs.

It's too bad the Democrats aren't ready to be serious. I mean, they're not even willing (yet) to follow Broder's advice and start bombing Iran.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai had a long piece Sunday (10/31/10) that argued that Tea Partiers are really the right-wing version of Bush-era MoveOn activists and bloggers (the "netroots"). Bai writes of "the larger forces that unify many self-styled activists on both the left and right," and suggests that "the recent uprisings on both ends of the ideological spectrum shouldn't be viewed as opposing trends, but rather as points on the same cultural continuum."

The only way to pull this off with a straight face is to decide that political beliefs that motivate both groups are not worth inspecting or critiquing. Thus  activists who coalesced around opposing the war in Iraq are basically no different than Tea Party activists who believe Barack Obama is a socialist. (As the Tea Party activist Bai profiles puts it: "He's a socialist.... There's no question. He's a statist.")

In a more rational media system, one would point out that one group was motivated by an actual policy decision--one that  killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The other group believes Barack Obama adheres to a political philosophy that he most certainly does not.

The ability to see these two political movements as being roughly comparable requires the suspension of critical judgment--an example of media "false balance" of the most extreme variety.  At one point Bai writes: "Ideology, of course, presents an unbridgeable chasm between the progressives and Tea Partiers." So does reality. Journalism that seeks to muddy up this inescapable truth does a great disservice.

David Broder--or an automated David Broderesque column-generator--bemoaned once again (Washington Post, 10/14/10) that "As the Gulf Between GOP and Democrats Widens, the Center Is Lost." To illustrate this dire situation, Broder (or the Broderbot) cited congressional voting patterns:

Bill Galston, the Brookings Institution's resident political philosopher, was the first of the day to point out that, statistically speaking, the center had already disappeared. He was referring to the congressional voting studies, which I have previously cited, showing that, apparently for the first time, there is no overlap between the most liberal Republican in the House and the most conservative Democrat when it comes to roll-call votes.

Historically, there have always been a few Republicans who voted often with the Democrats and a few more Democrats who lined up regularly with the Republicans. But now the ideological lines are more sharply drawn, and the distance between the parties is greater.

The phenomenon of party polarization is not brand new, though--Broder is referring to VoteView, a mathematical model that arranges lawmakers by how often they vote together, producing a scale that corresponds to the left/right spectrum. It's been finding that every House Republican has been to the right of every House Democrat since 2003. Before that, in the 107th Congress, there was one Democratic representative who voted to the right of several Republicans: James Traficant, who is best remembered for being expelled from the House after being convicted of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion. If only we had more politicians like him....

The fact is that the era of "bipartisanship" that Broder is so nostalgic for was a reflection of the fact that the Democratic Party once had, for historical and tactical reasons, a sizable number of conservative segregationists in it. After the battle for state-enforced segregation was lost, these conservatives drifted to their natural home in the Republican Party. Looking back on a time when urban liberals campaigned under the same banner as Southern racists as some kind of golden age is rather perverse--even for the Broderbot.

Politico has a story about how congressmembers and their staffs are avoiding the Colbert Report that contains this anecdote:

"My experience with that show is like herpes. It never goes away, and it itches and sometimes flares up," said a former aide to Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, after his boss appeared on the show in 2006. The conservative Georgia Republican, co-sponsor of a bill requiring that the 10 Commandments be displayed in Congress, was skewered by Colbert in a segment of "Better Know a District" for appearing to be able to name only three of the commandments.

The episode has "haunted" the office for years, the former aide said. “I deeply regret letting him go on the Colbert Report."

Colbert gave the guy the dumbass demagogue herpes!

Seriously, Rep. Westmoreland isn't haunted by Colbert. He's haunted by the reality of his ignorant demagoguery, briefly exposed on Colbert.  (Watch the video--it's not Colbert's editing that makes him come across as he does.) The Colbert Report is one of the few places where this sort of thing can happen anymore--and that should be the key point. Politicians are avoiding Colbert in favor of more friendly and servile venues--like news outlets.

Matthew Yglesias (8/3/10) has a good takedown of  senators John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn's (R.-Ok.) list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects that generated an "exclusive" on ABC's Good Morning America (8/3/10):

Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small grant to fund research on cocaine addiction and relapse is turned into "Monkeys Getting High for Science." Hardy-har-har. There's a case to be made that the government has no role to play in funding scientific research, but it's a mighty bad case. If you think the government should fund research in the health and medical fields, then of course you're going to be funding some experiments that involve monkeys. Even though monkeys are funny.

This animals-are-funny principle was followed by ABC's Jonathan Karl, who cited "among the highlights" of the McCain/Coburn press release not only the monkey study but also "nearly $1 million for the California Academy of Sciences to study exotic ants." That's doubly funny because they're bugs and they're "exotic." But the reason you would want to study exotic insects (meaning non-native) is that they're a threat to agriculture, either current or potential. Agriculture is a $36 billion-a-year industry in California--but this crucial context was ignored by ABC.

But including the context is dangerous, because it has the potential to reveal that what you're reporting is completely pointless. Karl led off his report with this example:

KARL: The Forest Service is spending more than $500,000 to replace the windows at this Mount St. Helens visitors center. It could sure use a facelift, but--

ANSWERING MACHINE: Coal Water Ridge Visitor Center is now closed.

KARL: The visitors center is closed and there's no plans to reopen it.

What an outrageous waste of taxpayer money! But then Karl follows up with this crucial bit of information: "The Forest Service told us, they are fixing it up to sell it." If that had been mentioned in the first place--"The Forest Service is spending half a million dollars to fix up a shuttered visitors center in order to sell it"--that wouldn't have sounded crazy at all; lots of homeowners make similar decisions about their property every day. But if it didn't sound crazy, it wouldn't have been a catchy way to lead off the report.

Of course, the real point of the list is not the individual items, but the general point that the whole stimulus program was a waste of money that failed to boost employment. On this economic question, ABC cites exactly one expert: John McCain, who declares of the projects he listed, "I think none of them really have any meaningful impact on creating jobs." This is the politician who declared during the 2008 campaign (Think Progress, 1/18/08), "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."

The Congressional Budget Office (5/25/10), whose understanding of economics is somewhat more advanced, estimated that in the first quarter of this year, the stimulus bill created the equivalent of 1.8 million to 4.1 million full-time jobs. This is context that ABC could have included in its story, but chose not to--perhaps because it would have revealed that the story had no real point.

In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections:

What I expect...if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal--when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

Krugman is on solid historical ground here: There is indeed a longstanding pattern of Democratic politicians, previously praised by pundits for their determinedly centrist policies, later being attacked by the same punditocracy for their self-defeating left-wing tendencies. As Extra! wrote back in 1992, in "Conventional Wisdom: How the Press Rewrites Democratic Party History Every Four Years":

According to mass media, [Bill] Clinton is running as a moderate who appeals to the "middle class" -- a plan that is seen as a contrast to previous Democratic runs. "The platform is not Mondale-Dukakis liberal, but Clinton moderate," reported the Christian Science Monitor (7/17/92).

Actually, both Mondale and Dukakis tried to win by moving the party to the right. "Look at our platform," said Mondale in his acceptance speech. "There are no defense cuts that weaken our security, no business taxes that weaken our economy, no laundry lists that raid our treasury." At the time, journalists agreed: "Democrats' Platform Shows a Shift From Liberal Positions of 1976 and 1980," ran the headline of the New York Times' analysis (7/22/84). "The minority planks that could have crippled his campaign were blocked," said the Christian Science Monitor (7/20/84).

It was the same story with the 1988 platform. Wrote the Washington Post (7/19/88): "The expansive promises of Democratic Party platforms of earlier years--the crowded bazaar of special interests and special pleadings--have been streamlined into the version that will go before the convention here Tuesday."

The piece concluded:

Why is it that Democratic party history gets revised every four years? It's largely because the "left" perspective in mainstream debate is represented by centrists who identify with the establishment politicians who dominate the Democratic Party leadership and feel estranged from the party's progressive constituencies. These pundits and political journalists seem reluctant to acknowledge that it was insiders, not activists, who led the party to crushing defeats in 1984 and 1988.

After describing the 1988 convention as a transition between the "Old Party" dominated by liberal "special interests" and the "New Party" characterized by post-ideological "problem-solvers" like Dukakis, William Schneider made a prediction (L.A. Times, 7/24/88): "If the problem-solvers can't win...there is every likelihood that Democrats will go back to what they really believe in." What actually happened, of course, was the same move that was made in 1984: When the "pragmatists" lose badly with their centrist approach, they are repainted after the fact as radicals, so the strategy of tilting to the right can be tried again and again.

And, in fact, when the Clinton administration's centrist policies, particularly NAFTA, resulted in the political disaster of the 1994 midterms, the Democrats' trouncing was indeed blamed on Clinton's supposedly left-wing policies (Extra!, 1-2/95).

It looks like history is going to repeat itself once again in November 2010.

To hear some of the Beltway media tell it, on Sunday White House press secretary Robert Gibbs predicted that the Democrats could lose their congressional majority in the November midterms.  The L.A. Times captured some of the sense of crisis (7/14/10), noting that

party leaders also tried to improve the gloomy prognosis. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, reversing course from comments he made over the weekend, said Tuesday he now believed Democrats would retain control of the House, a sentiment shared by the House majority leader, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.

It's odd, then, to look at what actually Gibbs said on NBC's Meet the Press--which does not seem at all controversial:

DAVID GREGORY: Two final points.  First of all, I want to get a prediction from you on, back on the political debate.  Is the House in jeopardy, the majority for the Democrats in the House, in jeopardy?

ROBERT GIBBS: I think there's no doubt that there are a lot of seats that will be up, a lot of contested seats.  I think people are going to have a choice to make in the fall.  But I think there's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control.  There's no doubt about that. This will depend on strong campaigns by Democrats. And again, I think we've got to take the issues to them.  You know, are--do you want to put into the speakership of the House, a guy who thinks that the financial calamity is, is tantamount to an ant?  The guy who's the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe Barton, started his congressional testimony of the CEO of BP by apologizing, not to the people in the Gulf, but to the CEO.  I think that's a perfect window, not into what people are thinking, but the way they would govern.  Joe Barton, John Boehner, those are the type of things you'll hear a lot, I think, from both the president and local candidates about what you'd get if the Republicans were to gain control.

Somehow this message--that mathematically speaking the Republicans could win in November if Democrats do not run strong campaigns--is the one Beltway pundits and reporters misrepresented and seized on.

A  more revealing exchange in the same Meet the Press interview came when host David Gregory asked a question that was essentially posed from the left, wondering if Obama's campaign rhetoric about breaking with Bush-era practices had been all talk:

The promise to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, yet it's still open. The Afghanistan war is not scaled down, it's been escalated. This administration has upheld the state secrets exemption in its pursuit of terrorists legally. It appears the worst-kept secret in Washington is that there appears to be abandoned plans to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in front of a civilian trial. Same strategy for North Korea and Iran, basically.

Gibbs'  response was to argue that the Obama White House has outflanked the Bush administration to the right on some of these issues--a much more revealing window into White House thinking than Gibbs' completely uncontroversial take on the midterms.

GIBBS: I hate to interrupt, but let's understand this. We have the toughest sanctions on North Korea that we've ever had as a result of unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution.

GREGORY: Same strategy. Same strategy.

GIBBS: Same strategy...

GREGORY: Pursued by the Bush administration.

GIBBS: More important, better tactics. We've got the strongest sanctions regime on Iran that has ever been in place. And, David, go back...

GREGORY: Same strategy as the Bush administration.

GIBBS: But, but understand--let's go back to the Bush administration.

GREGORY: Yeah.

GIBBS: You brought this up. I know the next panel's going to say I blamed this all on the Bush administration...

GREGORY: No, no, no. But can I just finish?

GIBBS: But--let me...

GREGORY: The predicate here, which is, is it harder to do a reversal from Bush foreign policy than you originally thought?

GIBBS: No, because I think you've greatly oversimplified it. It--if you ask Ed Gillespie, ask any of the folks that you had right now, if in September of 2008 or October of 2008 or November of 2008 whether China and Russia were going to come on board for strengthening sanctions against Iran. The answer to that would be a flat no. You wouldn't have gotten to the Security Council because you would have had at least two countries raise their hand to veto those. This president has put together a coalition that includes Russia and China, that's actually strengthened our sanctions regime on South Korea [sic]. We have better relationships with virtually every country in the world as a result of the president's foreign policy outreach. We're reducing nuclear weapons in this world that we know can cause the type of calamity, whether they accidentally launch or whether they fell into the hands of a terrorist. There's no doubt, David, that we have taken foreign policy in a different direction. We have improved relationships with countries, but not just as a means to an ends. That's actually making our country safer and more secure as a result. I think you created, oversimplified, sort of, what the president is trying to do, because the things that he's instituted couldn't have been done in the last administration.

"Same strategy...better tactics." If that's the new White House motto, that's a lot more newsworthy than saying that Democrats are going to have to work hard to win the midterms.

NPR's Brooke Gladstone (On the Media, 6/11/10) interviewed CNN's Ed Henry about the squirt-gun party at the vice president's mansion that Henry giddily tweeted about:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If these events don't influence coverage, why do you think the White House throws them? Do they just want to shoot you with a super-soaker?

ED HENRY: Maybe they wanna actually get to know us as people sometimes.

And Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 2/15/10) comments:

Marc Ambinder disclosed that it was the DNC that paid for the party.  But Ed Henry thinks that they do that because Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden and the other White House officials just decided they wanted an opportunity to get to know Ed and Wolf and the other members of the media just a little bit better as people.  They want to get behind the facade of the grizzly, ornery reporter and get in touch with the Real Ed, the Human Being.  That's how CNN's senior White House correspondent thinks.