Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that Marc Ambinder’s “the hippies were wrong to be right” post is such a classic that it merits further discussion. Here’s Paul Krugman:
But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.
Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.
Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.
The rules of modern day punditry are almost as complex as those of modern day wingnuts (minus the boycotts, I guess). Whether or not something is rational is of no relevance. Arcane mixtures of “balance”, deference to power, and “seriousness” have completely replaced common sense.
Yutsano
Just as a point of rhetoric, shouldn’t that DFH tag be on just about everything on here?
lawnorder
That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.
What was reflexive was the Bush defending.
By impugning the motives of critics the right wing manage to navigate 8 years on a opposition free mainstream media.
Ambinder at least does a tiny bit of soul searching. The other pundits are much worse.
mai naem
One of the problems with the Bushies is that there so many actual “conspiracies” that I now see “conspiracies” everywhere. And I am one of those people who used to laught at liberals and conservatives when I felt they were going off to nutcase land.
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
Hey…not to mention the social security privatization bamboozle attempt.
Can you imagine, looking back, if that had gone forward. Those greedy bastards on Wall Street would have made that money disappear with the rest of it.
Think about it…they made regular people’s money evaporate into thin air. They could have taken the rest of it too.
khead
This is one horse worth beating for the entertainment value alone.
General Winfield Stuck
In late 2005, largely after Katrina, Bushes approval rating went south to the low 30’s and stuck there like crazy glue. No other presnit in the history of polling has had that happen for that long. Polling numbers with cement shoes that no matter what happen day to day they didn’t budge one iota upward,, and even sank some. Even when Iraq started to settle down amidst all the Surge genius nonsense, they didn’t move.
This speaks for itself, regardless of anything we DFH’s may have said or did.
Mike in NC
Fuck Ambinder. Still and forever a Jonah Goldberg wannabe.
Augustine
Welcome to the trans-rational state…
cbear
IMO, there ain’t a dimes worth of difference between Ambinder, Sullivan, Klein, and dozens of other “journalists” who currently pollute the media.
Anybody catch Chuck Todd on Maher’s show last nite?
Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the Blackwater expose, was on and pawned Todd’s ass by pointing out his calling torture investigations “cable catnip”. At which point, Todd tried to demean Scahill as a DFH. What an asshole.
Sadly, I used to think Todd was a little above average (which isn’t saying much) but apparently he just can’t hang with Tweety, Scarborough, and the gang without becoming a total douche.
Louise
So happy to see folks piling on Ambinder. Anyone still trotting out that “waaah, they just didn’t like him” bullshit should be tarred and feathered.
JK
Marc Ambinder is a morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest slob. I’m sick and tired of this putrid, lying sack of shit who gave aid and comfort to those stupid fucking teabaggers and blasted the DHS report on the threat of right wing extremism.
Fuck Ambinder, Marc Halperin, Chuck Todd, Howard Kurtz, Chip Reid, and the other assholes in the Washington press corps who continue to suck the cock of the Republican Party while the Rethuglicans in Congress spread lie after lie in their effort to destroy Obama.
Comrade Kevin
@cbear: What Scahill did to Todd was a thing of beauty. Todd really is an idiot.
Proper Gander
Yeah, I had a gut hatred of Bush. And I’m fully satisfied with my reasons for it. I had him pegged as a phony, mealy-mouthed, ignorant wannabe hick. To this day, I still consider myself a good judge of people based upon my reaction to the man. I had a similar reaction to Glenn Beck. Who’s going to tell me that I’m wrong?
Some people are just so loathsome it shows. And if some people have the wool pulled over their eyes so easily, why do they feel the need to diss the perceptive ones when all is said and done?
evie
I can’t stand Ambinder, but even I’m left feeling for the guy taking it on the chin from every progressive blogger on the planet because he was the only “villager” to even acknowledge he was wrong. Yes, he brought it on himself by rationalizing it, and his reasoning is completely wrong, but can anyone, anywhere acknowledge that he is the only media person to even admit the error? All I see are journalists clutching pearls and gasping in horror — like it wasn’t obvious and in front of their faces the entire time.
But they are all like Gregory — they look themselves in the mirror and feel confident they did “the right thing considering what they knew at the time.”
I’m sure, though, that the beating Ambinder is taking will stiffen the spines of others to stand up and admit error as well.
cbear
@Comrade Kevin: What was especially sickening was how Todd first tried to align himself with Scahill and expound on some of his points—and it wasn’t until Scahill called him out for being part of the problem that he turned dismissive.
tripletee
Shorter Krugman: “Ambinder, your tears – they are delicious.”
The pile-on is richly deserved in Ambinder’s case, and his noisy, throbbing butt-hurt just makes it even sweeter.
PeakVT
I’ll admit that from the get-go I always assumed that whatever the Bush administration was doing was wrong. But I paid attention during the 1990s and during the election campaign, so I felt justified in assuming the worst.
General Winfield Stuck
@evie:
Apologies without works are hollow, meaning meaningless. I get your point, but if there is no effort to do better, apology becomes a kind of smarmy exercise in vanity. And it’s hard to assign points for that.
Roger Moore
Fixt. The core of what’s going on is that the pundits screwed up big time back when Bush was in charge, and they’re afraid that a reputation for screwing up will destroy their cushy gigs as pundits. So they have to engage in ever more bizarre, twisted logic to avoid admitting that they got stuff wrong. Now things are so bad that they only logic that works is showing that wrong was really right and right was really wrong. By next week, it will mutate into “everybody already knew that, so it doesn’t belong in the news”.
ellaesther
I wanted, so very very badly, to be wrong about Bush, et al, ESPECIALLY after 9/11. I was practically begging the Administration to prove me an idiot. I wanted, in short, to be led by decent people.
And they, in turn, proved me right. Over, and over, and over, and fucking OVER again. And again. And oh, hey! Again!
So, as Krugman says: Not reflexive — rational. Rationality at its purest. I, in fact, should be mocked for ever so much as holding out hope.
Keith G
When a faceless pundit type pisses me off, I Google it’s image to get a better notion of what I am dealing with. What is it with these conservative pundits who are pasty doughboy types… Ambinder, Douthat, Golberg. I mean, Christ, have they ever met a Ho Ho they didn’t like.
Sorry for the shallow rant, but thus seems the dichotomy of conservative punditry: anorexic women and puffy men.
lawnorder
@evie:
Agreed. Even if Ambinder and the others deserve our contempt, I’ll gladly exchange that little moment of satisfaction for beating on him and the others, for the years of lessons those guys admitting their errors can give to a new generation of journalists.
If Ridge, another wiling enabler of GW, had not spoken, we would still be called “crazy” for having seen the truth. If Scotty McClellan hadn’t had a “come Jesus” moment, we would still not have confirmation of a lot of Bush’s misdeeds.
I for one, hope that all non-criminal Bush insiders come trying to redeem themselves telling the truth now, and feel safe to do so, without being bitch slapped by us liberals.
Sure they are weasels and opportunistic. Let’s be opportunistic too and use their confessions to teach a next generation how to never repeat this 8 years.
Chad N Freude
@Proper Gander:
I will: There was nothing phony about the mealy-mouthedness, ignorance, wannabe-ness, and hickitude. It was all genuine.
Cat Lady
@cbear:
Chuck Todd wants a house on Nantucket too. That’s all that matters to him. Journamilism is what it takes.
General Winfield Stuck
@General Winfield Stuck:@evie:
I should say that I rarely read Ambinder, usually only when he says something stupid enough to get a thread at BJ. Which means you are more likely right than I on the guy.
Shygetz
Confession time…when Bush pushed the Iraqi WMDs, I believed him. Not because I trusted Bush, but because I honestly believed that if we went to war and it turned out that Iraq did not have WMDs, the Republicans would be out of power for twenty years and there’s no way Bush would risk that. Turns out, I was naive and wrong. After that, I never trusted Bush again, and for very good, very rational reasons.
Mark S.
@Shygetz:
Yeah, I thought there would be more backlash about that. I also naively thought that this country would be appalled by torture.
But as General Winfield Stuck said, Bush’s numbers held steady until Katrina. I guess people can forgive evil, but they can’t forgive evil and incompetent.
AhabTRuler
Well, the talking heads actually managed to hock up some outrage over Katrina. Invading another country under false pretenses, torture, graft, &c. not so much
Doctor Science
I did not, at first, have a reflexive hatred of GW Bush, partly because I more pitied than hated his father. Barbara pulled the wool over my eyes at first, but my own mother (currently in her mid-80s and sharp as a katana) loathed Babs from the get-go.
Anyway, I was willing to give GWB a little time to prove himself — but Cheney, now, Cheney always gave me that Star Wars Emperor vibe, and *him* I honestly hated early and often.
Maybe it’s all my reading of sf/f epics with Good Guys and Evil Guys, emphasizing how important it is to figure out which is which. Did Ambinder et al. never expect to meet Evil, so they didn’t recognize it when it came, or did they expect it but were looking for different field marks?
Ed Drone
I think we need a reconciliation commission — for pundits and ‘journalists’ only. Let the sons-of-bitches from the Bush government go*, but make the talking heads plead mea culpa, maxima culpa, mea maxima culpa — one day each should suffice.
Note * Actually, I don’t suggest actually ‘letting them go,’ as such — just don’t make them confess and be publicly humiliated. Jail will do.
Ed
General Winfield Stuck
It was during one of the debates with Gore that Bush first scared the beejeebers out of me. Until then, I knew little about, and did not care very much for politics and did not follow politics. I voted in presnit elections, but that was about it for me.
It was his answer, and more importantly his body language to a question about his stance on the death penalty. I sensed a scary streak of something like sadistic in the guy and it brought a cold chill of alarm.
That’s when I first got interested in politics that was fueled further by the election fiasco in Florida and how all that went down.
After he came to be appointed presnit, I still kept an open mind and if a pollster had called me in the aftermath of 9-11 and Afghanistan, I would have given a tepid approval.
Then came Iraq, and the rest is sad history.
mclaren
THE PUNDIT’S DICTIONARY
“serious” = publicly favors torture, pointless wars
of aggression, warrantless wiretapping
“shrill” = points out documented facts
“absurd” = draws logical conclusions
“insightful” = decades-long history of being wrong
“profound” = advocates mass murder or gross corruption
“ridiculous” = uses common sense
“popular” = follows the D.C. beltway lemmings
“unpopular” = suggests policies with overwhelming public
support
“realistic” = speaks from the perspective of a billionaire
“unrealistic” = speaks from the perspective of 99.9999% of
the U.S. population
“destructive” = upholds the constitution of the United
States
“moderate” = advocates mass murder, torture,
abandoning rationality. young-earth
creationism, kidnapping without a warrant
and without a trial
“majority” = a handful of billionaires and their courtiers
“minority” = 330 million Americans
r€nato
I think the thing that disappoints me most about this Ambinder business is how rapidly and small what I call the “window of amnesia” has shrunk.
What the GOP did to Clinton – the witch hunts, the hysterical shrieks of “RULE OF LAW! RULE OF LAW!” – seems to have completely disappeared from the consciousness of Americans during their 8 year reign of terror and torture and corruption.
That was 10 years ago – ONLY 10 years ago, well within the political consciousness of most adults – and yet the reason voters threw the Republicans out in the last two elections wasn’t to punish them for being the biggest fucking hypocrites ever for their sanctimonious bullshit (how many of Clinton’s inquistors were ever put under oath and asked the most intimate details of their sex lives and their affairs, of which there were many among the GOP crotchsniffers), it was for general corruption, gross incompetence and Bush fatigue.
Now with Ambinder, he is writing about shit that happened 5 years ago and already history is being re-written (on his part) as if none of us remember it or lived through not-all-that-long-ago, while the memories are still fresh.
This is deeply disturbing to me. How on earth are those in power going to be held accountable if recent history is being re-written? It’s like a free enterprise version of 1984… instead of a big government bureau re-writing yesterday’s news, the Right has gotten it ‘privatized’ and farmed out to the so-called liberal media.
Chad N Freude
@mclaren: Not bad. There’s a book in there somewhere.
r€nato
I’m thinking Ambinder decided Evil was the kind of guy he’d like to have a beer with, and that sucking up to him would be good for his career, so he just went with it and looked the other way.
Chad N Freude
@r€nato:
Your point is well taken, but a lot of voters really don’t make these associations. As a country, we are not really politically engaged and we have short memories about … what was I saying?
Janet Strange
As was often the case, Molly said it best.
(insert reflexive “god I miss that woman” here)
Worth reading every word, as always, but to lure you into clicking the link, it includes the lovely phrase “garboid right-wing cow-flops.”
AhabTRuler
@Janet Strange: Hey, go easy on the Koalas. They just want to get high on Eucalyptus, hang out in trees, and occasionally take flights on Qantas airlines. That’s not nearly as detrimental to society as a beauty queen.
Now neo-Marxist Kangaroos, OTOH, are a clear and present danger to Australian society.
MoeLarryAndJesus
I hate when people call this creature “Ambers.” How about Ratbastard instead?
FMguru
Ambinder was actually a good campaign reporter last year – he broke a lot of stories, had excellent sources in and around the Republican camp, and was (IMHO) a must-read if you wanted to follow the campaigns. But after the election his writing switched to political analysis, and I couldn’t unsubscribe from his feed quickly enough. He really is pure, distilled Essence of Villager.
The one thing that’s still funny about him are his repeated expressions of out-and-out astonishment that the Bush administration lied about things, that it politicized security policy and the justice department and outed covert agents. Even in his sad-sack apology, he’s defending the fact that his first reaction to news about official malfeasance is to uncritically accept the statements of government spokesmen, and he’s genuinely puzzled that anyone finds this strange behavior for a top-tier national reporter. His instinct is to trust and protect the powerful, and he can’t understand why anyone would behave differently. It’s amazing.
Ailuridae
@mclaren:
Is that your doing? I likey.
Mike P
@evie:
His “apology” was self-serving and he only really issued it after everyone called him on his mind reading.
The best thing was that he was whining on Twitter about everyone hitting him and Atrios, in his special way, indicated that the whole thing wasn’t about him…Ambers missed that and continued his spluttering.
He could stop all of this if he’s stop speculating and started doing, you know, some more thinking and reporting.
Mike P
As a follow up, given all the shit that’s going down, if I’m Obama, I’d have a prime time speech and say:
“You know what, America? The same people who are trying to tell you that I’m coming to kill grandma are the same people who told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The same people who fired good soldiers for being honest about how many troops we’d need in Iraq. The same people who told us that deficits don’t matter. The same people who put through tax cuts and a prescription drug benefit that didn’t, and never even conceived, of paying for themselves. The same people that told us that they were doing a heck of a job while hundreds died in New Orleans. I could go on…but that’s more than enough.
They don’t deserve your support. They certainly haven’t earned your trust. And even if you don’t agree with what I’m doing, I’m not going to raise the terror alert to red just because you don’t like my health care plan”.
Anne Laurie
@General Winfield Stuck:
You know the term sociopath? There are some kinds of Dangerous Crazy that leak pheromones even through the television pixels. Animals, very young children, and other adults who’ve survived life-and-death traumas (combat veterans, adult children of alcoholics, child abuse survivors) are especially good at picking up the bad-craziness vibe. Too many nice, well-meaning, properly-reared grownups have damped their instincts down so far that they interpret stuff like Dubya’s mocking the woman whose death warrant he’d just signed, or Reagan’s sunny obliviousness to the suffering of others, as just “wackiness” or “disconnection”. There was a reason you never saw St. Ronnie holding a baby, and why Dubya’s own dog didn’t seem to like him.
MelodyMaker
@21
“Christ, have they ever met a Ho Ho..”
it’s too long for a band name, but I like it.
bob h
Recall another incident from 2006: Ned Lamont, who I worked for, had just beaten Joe Lieberman in the CT Dem primary, with Iraq the main point of disagreement.
To steal Lamont’s thunder, and prop up Lieberman, Homeland Security released the very next day details of a vague plot by British Muslims to mass hijack airplanes. The timing was not coincidence.
Dan
And DougJ, the historical revisionism has already begun. Remember: It was all just a lark.
Svensker
@Mike P:
Could you give Rahm a call, please?
That is EXACTLY what they should be saying.
Marion
The right also used to call lefties who opposed Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930’s (while they were still the right’s pinup boys) ‘premature antifascists’. As Talleyrand said ‘Treason is a question of dates’
ppcli
@Svensker:
Wow, yes. Mike P really has nailed it. Though we might add:
These are the same people who howled that lying under oath about a non-crime in a crafted perjury trap was a venal, impeachment-worthy sin, and then with exactly the same tone of self-righteousness professed outrage that poor Scooter was being persecuted for just “lying under oath about something that wasn’t a crime”. (Though in fact what Libby did was, in fact, a crime.)
Memo to John C.: perhaps we should have a post where people can just list these things in the comments, and then compile them. It would be good to have a canonical list of all this crap that people can just point to to save time.
pcbedamned
I can still remember the day that Bush won in 2000. I looked at my husband and said to him, “There is going to be a war. He’s got to finish what Daddy couldn’t.” It is one of those times that I really wish I had been proven wrong.
(just to add, I am Canadian and didn’t even have a dog in the race, so it wasn’t a case of BDS)
Bobby
@Doctor Science:
My Mom (like yours still sharp as a tack) was in school with Barbara Bush and your Mom is right.
Xenos
@bob h: The British were very pissed off at the timing, and they had to dismiss charges against half of the suspects because their investigation had not been allowed to develop in a timely fashion. At a basic level, Bin Ladin and Bush were on the same side.
tc125231
What I find impossible to understand, is why you would consider either Brooks or Ambinder sincere. Their product is disingenuously “sincere” defense of the indefensible –and they both appear to be doing well off it.
So, in their case, they say these things because it pays. (See Kurt Vonnegut, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”)
racrecir
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
– from another book peddler
IdahoSpud
Whocoodanode that the neocons might politicize the terror-warning system for their own nefarious ends? Ambinder, it seems, is badly lacking in critical thinking skills.
From wiki:
“Critical thinking is an important element of all professional fields and academic disciplines (by referencing their respective sets of permissible questions, evidence sources, criteria, etc.). Within the framework of scientific skepticism, the process of critical thinking involves the careful acquisition and interpretation of information and use of it to reach a well-justified conclusion.”
and:
“When persons possess intellectual skills alone, without the intellectual traits of mind, weak sense critical thinking results. Fair-minded or strong sense critical thinking requires intellectual humility, empathy, integrity, perseverance, courage, autonomy, confidence in reason, and other intellectual traits. Thus, critical thinking without essential intellectual traits often results in clever, but manipulative and often unethical, thought.”
Bingo!
AlanDownunder
Somewhere deep inside their heads, little voices are telling Armbinder and his ilk that they enabled the monstrosity that is USA 2001-2009.
Somewhere closer to the surface, they’re realising that a sincere apology for unleashing what they have unleashed would not quite amount to ritual hari kiri.
So Armbinder resorted to something a lot less. And forever will. Just like all the others.