With all the chatter about the inevitability of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination, it might be useful to recall the last time the media were sending the same message about an early favorite, at least according to the national polls:

I noticed a few stories in today's USA Today (6/13/11) about supposed Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. There will be plenty more of this to come--horserace commentary based on polling that's being done in order to give journalists a reason to talk about one candidate more than another, which candidate has "momentum" and so on.

It's worth remembering that the polling at this stage of the race is useless. Actually, it's probably worse than that, since the political press corps obsesses over this trivia at the expense of doing any actually useful reporting about the candidates.

I wanted to find a story from around the same time frame in 2007 to illustrate how misguided this polling can be. It didn't take long. Here's the lead of a June 7, 2007 Washington Post article:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds a solid lead over her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, while the contest for the Republican nomination appears even more unsettled than it did when it began five months ago, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Clinton's lead remains steady over her two principal challengers, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and the poll contains troubling news for both. Obama's support has softened noticeably, highlighting the challenge he faces in turning high interest in his candidacy into votes. Edwards, meanwhile, has lost ground nationally over the past few months.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani remains the leader in the GOP race, but the poll suggests that the surge in support he received after declaring his candidacy has stalled and that his backing of abortion rights and gay rights has caused more Republicans to turn away from him.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona runs second in the GOP race, but the poll results raise questions about his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has spent millions on television ads already this year, has in some ways become an attractive alternative over the past few months, and former Sen. Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee shows the potential to quickly make the GOP contest a four-way battle.

The poll provides a revealing snapshot of the 2008 presidential race as the candidates gather this week for a pair of debates in New Hampshire, which will hold the first primary next year.

It's probably better for American political leaders that we forget the U.S. bombing of Cambodia.  "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves," was how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1970 (NY Times, 5/27/04), reflecting Richard Nixon's concern that the large-scale aerial bombing wasn't doing enough damage.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton released Air Force records on the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan wrote (Walrus, 10/06):

The still-incomplete database (it has several "dark" periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.

Estimates of Cambodian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing vary; in 1975, the Washington Post (4/24/75) estimated 450,000 dead and wounded.

So now the current secretary of state visited the country that the United States so ruthlessly bombed in the not-so-distant past. According to the report of the visit in the New York Times (11/2/10), Hillary Clinton expressed support for justice for the victims--that is, the victims of the horrific violence perpetrated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which rose to power in the wake of the U.S. assault on the country.  As the Times put it:

Mrs. Clinton repeated an argument that has been used by proponents of the trials, saying that "a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it."

Clinton's attitude stands in contrast to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who readers are told believes the country should "dig a hole and bury the past." Clinton also said: "Countries that are held prisoner to their past can never break those chains and build the kind of future that their children deserve.... Although I am well aware the work of the tribunal is painful, it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace."

It is a remarkable testimony to the strength of our propaganda system that the Newspaper of Record can run a story like this with a straight face, with a top U.S. official urging accountability for atrocities in a country where the U.S. government committed so many. Those atrocities, apparently, have long ago been given the Hun Sen treatment.

And bonus irony: A few weeks ago Clinton introduced Kissinger before his address at a State Department conference on the U.S. war on Indochina (AlterNet, 9/28/10). Presumably she was equally concerned with the need to hold Kissinger accountable for his crimes, and is seeking a tribunal that will do the "painful" work necessary to build a future our children deserve.

Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn "is the Wall Street Journal's 'Microtrend'-spotting columnist" and "also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller," Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that "only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter."

Alas, "Scumbag spotted!" is Nolan's cry when writing that

Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) "Microtrend" column is about "glamping"--glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients.

Nolan goes on to remind us that "Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position." It's particularly interesting to recall that scandal as "a story that the WSJ broke," considering how, as Nolan puts it, "moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician," but "now he's screwing a newspaper the same way."

The dominant story from Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo.  No, the top story was Clinton's testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo.

That exchange prompted a whole story in today's New York Times by Jeffrey Gettleman ("Clinton's Flash of Pique in Congo"). While that's already kind of sad, it turns out that the questioner misspoke; he actually meant to ask what Barack Obama thought of these deals. But either way, apparently, you get to psychoanalyze Hillary Clinton:

After the forum, her aides told the traveling press corps that there might have been a mistranslation, and that the student actually wanted to know the opinion of her boss, not her husband. But that interpretation did not dispel the controversy either, since it gave new life to the nagging question of whether Mrs. Clinton felt marginalized in the Obama administration.

See? If the question was really about Obama, you can take the answer she gave to the question about her husband and use it to gauge her true feelings about her role in the Obama administration. Neat trick.

Gettleman's piece concludes:

No matter the issues she was talking about--encouraging good governing, ending Africa's wars, lifting women up from their lowly position in a place like Congo. The interest in this trip, it seemed, was not about the problems facing Africa. It was about her.

As one journalist covering her trip put it: "She is a celebrity. We have a celebrity secretary of state. When you have a celebrity, you get celebrity coverage."

Well, it's nice to know that journalists covering U.S. foreign policy see their jobs this way.

Guest Women In Media & News blogger Adele M. Stan (8/5/09) has some more to say about the WashingtonPost.com's "now-infamous 'Mad Bitch' video":

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler shone a light on a video produced by the Washington Post that featured one of the two columnists hosting the piece suggesting that, at a future White House beer summit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be given a brew called "Mad Bitch." Then all hell broke loose.

The Post apparently thought it could fix the problem by simply pulling the video. A note was posted above the hole where the video used to be, reading that the piece had been removed because it contained material that was "inappropriate" for the Post website. As if it had landed there from Mars. As if it hadn't been written and produced in the Washington Post building by Washington Post staffers.

Then, yesterday, the two columnists, Chris Cillizza and Dana Milbank, had the effrontery to post what amounts to a "screw-you" response video to the criticism they had received from bloggers.

Stan reports that, in the fallout, "the series has been canceled," but "Milbank remains pretty unrepentant, instead whining about the drubbing he took at the hands of blogosphere denizens."

Even after receiving a critical letter signed by Stan, Jennifer Pozman, Katha Pollitt and many others, Post executive editor Marcus "Brauchli, for his part, did not exactly apologize," and "it does not appear that there will be any disciplinary action."

Howard Kurtz recently offered fellow Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza a chance to apologize for having, in an online Post feature, "implied Hillary Clinton was a 'bitch.'"

But American Prospect's Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (8/5/09) has a question regarding Milbank's aside that "it's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere.... I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be":

What's the sound of a million hands facepalming? No one who goes around using obscenities to describe other reporters and administration officials should be complaining about the "ferocity" of blogs--if Milbank is bothered by it, he might start by admitting his own complicity in creating that kind of discourse.

Serwer's reiteration that "Milbank's unique place in the journalism world entails him making fun of people for a living" yields a simple maxim: "If you can't take it, don't dish it."

Corporate media outlets treat U.S. intelligence agencies with solemn reverence when those agencies are reinforcing official views about American enemies and friends. This is true even when the same media outlets are duped by intelligence agencies time and again.

But stray from the nationalist straight and narrow, and these otherwise respected sources risk becoming invisible, perhaps even suspicious.

That's what happened in the run up to the Iraq War. CIA director George Tenet was prominently quoted as he affirmed the White House's most dire fabrications, but when intelligence officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force challenged key aspects of the White House's case for war, they were downplayed or ignored in favor of intelligence supporting the case for war.

As Washington Post Pentagon reporter Thomas Ricks put it (8/12/04), "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?" And the New York Times mea culpa on the subject, for all of its faults, similarly acknowledged that "Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."

This model goes some way in explaining why major media outlets continue to report without question President Barack Obama’s and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claims that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, even while their own director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, says it's not true.

As an excellent post by Charlie Davis points out:

Just over a week ago -- and after Blair had told another Senate panel that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons -- Secretary Clinton told ABC's Charlie Gibson that "Iran's pursuit of the nuclear weapon is deeply troubling to not only the U.S. but many people throughout the world." Obama has likewise consistently referred to Iran's "development" or "pursuit" of nuclear weapons.

It would be simple for journalists at major media outlets with official access to ask why the president and the secretary of state are making claims that U.S. intelligence can't back up. But even after all the confessions and mea culpas, the damage resulting from other instances when they failed to challenge officials, many journalists apparently still haven't learned the lesson.

[In an earlier version of this post, the headline mistakenly referred to Dennis Blair as the “DCI”-- he is the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence.]

The headline (and subhead) in today's print edition:

National Security Team Would Be Diverse Mix
Obama Picks Span Eras; Some Espouse More Centrist Views

And what, exactly, makes for a "diverse mix?" Holding "moderate" views against a troop withdrawal from Iraq, apparently:

Obama's latest picks would give him a foreign policy team with a moderate cast. Both Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden have taken a more cautious approach to withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq than Obama, who wanted it done within 16 months of taking office. Jones, who last year chaired an independent commission appointed by Congress to assess the Iraq situation, called political reconciliation by the religious and ethnic factions in Iraq vital--a view shared by Obama. Jones, however, said a deadline for troop withdrawal would be "against our national interest."

On Fox News Sunday (11/16/08), NPR reporter Mara Liasson offered her take (which was essentially the same as neo-con co-panelist Bill Kristol) on why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State would be good for Barack Obama:

In terms of Obama, I think he wants--it would send a lot of important signals. Number one, she is hawkish, as Bill pointed out. He has to kind of put to rest this notion that he was naive, which, of course, came from her during the campaign.

She’s hawkish, which will balance out his naiveté. If this is supposed to be a reference to the fact that Clinton supported the Iraq War, then it makes even less sense.