Many of the Americans among you, I suspect, will have heard of the telling incident this week in which Fox News aired a news item on the stimulus bill which repeated, word for word, the points in a press release from the Senate Republicans. Without ever mentioning that the analysis they were presenting came straight from Republican officials, of course. “It was so blatant,” Steve Benen notes, “Fox News’ on-screen graphic included the identical typo made in the original GOP document, making it obvious that the network used a party press release as a news script”.

But bias isn’t usually as jaw-droppingly stupid or outrageous. Subtle still isn’t quite the right word, but try this on: Some Critics Blame Emanuel for Obama’s Cabinet Troubles. I clicked the headline because, well, I don’t like Emanuel, so I’m in principle well-disposed to believing the diagnosis, even if it does come from Fox. (The HuPo, for example – admittedly not the most reliable source either – last week had a disturbing take on the stimulus negotiations, which alleged that Rahm had undermined Congressional Democrats and Nancy Pelosi in order to curry favour from moderate Republicans and deflect criticism of Obama.)

Alas. The Fox headline referred “some critics”. The opening sentence read, “President Obama’s latest Cabinet setback [..] has put the White House on the defensive, particularly Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom some critics blame for cracks in the vetting process.” So what inside sources had Fox News found dishing the dirt on Rahmbo? Who was blaming Emanuel, and what did they have to share about his role in these vetting mess-ups?

Um, well … “some critics” turns out to refer to exactly one person. And that person turns out to be “Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.” That’s it. The only person they got to blame Rahm was the spokesperson to a lowly Republican Congressman, who himself is a bit of a crackpot.

The whole story, in fact, quotes just two sources. One is, unsurprisingly, Democratic consultant Doug Schoen, the kind of Democrat Republicans love; but even he refused to play ball, saying that “it’s hard to defend or attack Emanuel without knowing how involved he’s been in the vetting process,” and that it “doesn’t strike me as fair or appropriate [..] to put it all on Rahm”. The other’s Bardella.

He gets no less than six paras, though.

Joe Wurzelbacher aka the Plumber (via TNR The Plank):

Today I had one briefing, and that was at the Club for Growth, I spoke to Andy Roth. Now yesterday, I talked to the Heritage Foundation. I actually had the chance to talk to the Cato Institute as well, I guess you could call it a briefing, it was more of an interview. But all these bipartisan, or if you will neutral, think tanks are pretty much saying the same things.

Club for Growth, Heritage, Cato … “bipartisan, or if you will neutral, think tanks”. Words fail.

This, note, is a guy the conservative Republicans in Congress invited to star at their strategy meeting this week. As Obama said, back during the campaign: it’s like these guys take pride in their ignorance.

Noting that Kevin Hassett, of Dow 36000 fame, is now director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and confidently proclaiming his neo-Hooverite recipes for tackling the financial crisis, Neil Sinhababu of Donkeylicious sighs, “I guess it’s kind of like the Iraq War, where you can give really bad advice and still hold onto an awesome think tank job.”

Which leaves us, he adds, only with the power of satire. Crude satire, to fit crude stupidity. Here’s Neil’s reworking of Hassett’s now-notorious book – and here’s mine:

This story, surely, could. Not. Possibly. Be. True.

Krispy Kreme decided, just for Inauguration Day, to “honor [..] American’s [sic] sense of pride and freedom of choice [..], by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day”. Check.

Bigwig wingnut is wingnutty and takes offence. Okay … I suppose. In the nature of things.

Bigwig wingnut in question is Judie Brown, President of the American Life League, who sent out a news release headlined KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS.

What?

It’s for real, alas. The news release is on the ALL website, in all its incredible, batshit insane glory. Choice snippets:

The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama’s radical support for abortion on demand [..]

The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that “choice” is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of ‘freedom of choice’ is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand. [..]

A misconstrued concept of “choice” has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free doughnuts to celebrate this “freedom.”” [..]

We challenge Krispy Kreme doughnuts to [..] separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame.”

Gallup has a new poll up already about the presidential elections of 2012. Which will be sure to either make you run off screaming, or sigh contentedly at the brief respite from post-elections detox.

It asked Republicans and Republican-leaners, “Now, thinking ahead to the 2012 presidential election, please say whether you would, or would not like to see each of the following Republicans run for president in 2012”. I turned the results into this graph:

Poll: Which of these Republicans would you like to see run for President in 2012?

I don’t know about you, but what struck me most about these numbers is just how disgruntled Republicans are right now about the choices they have at hand. There’s not one person in this list that is not dismissed by at least about a third of Republicans. Of the ten potential wannabees, just three at least enjoy a reasonably significant positive balance. 

There seems to be a broad rejection of both the recent and further past of the party. Poor Jeb Bush faces the second largest deficit of all, presumably mostly because of the burden of his family name. Newt Gingrich, painful to his renowned ego it may be, is rejected by a plurality of Republicans. Congressional veteran and McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham is the least popular of the lot. Even General Petraeus, so passionately defended by conservatives against his MoveOn detractors, is rejected by almost 40%. Republicans love a military bigwig to defend, but apparently really want to move beyond the associations with Iraq.

It’s maybe no coincidence that the top three choices – Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee – are all very much newcomers to national Republican politics. Huckabee was derided by practically the entire Republican establishment, including the traditional leaders of the religious right, but there he is, the third most viable candidate on the shortlist. Hell, in this context Rudy Giuliani merits a fifth place, even after his disastrous crash-and-burn primary campaign.

Notably, two of the top three are conservative hardliners, with little appeal to the middle-ground of US politics. Democrats will be glad: it seems that the road back to power will be long and winding for the GOP.

Old-fashioned Clinton derangement syndrom

Yesterday, I wrote (at length..) about the prevalence of abortion clinic bombings and other attacks on reproductive health workers. All in response to Sarah Palin’s remarks in her interview with Brian Williams that while Bill Ayers is obviously a terrorist, those abortion clinic bombers? “I don’t know if you’re going to use the word terrorist there”.

I ended up noting that hey, at least the number of violent attacks has gone down significantly since their peak in the early and mid-nineties. But why? Maybe because bombing just lost some of its cool even to the manic fringes of the religious right after 9/11. Maybe because, well, times change, a new generation has come to age. But at the back of my mind, I worry about a third possible explanation:

You could speculate on a more troubling correlation though, one to do with how this kind of domestic terrorism appears to have peaked in the early and mid-nineties. An era, in short, when conservatives were faced with a man being elected President who embodied, in their perception, everything they were against. When they were faced, also, with a looming sense that they were losing the culture wars against a new generation (the baby-boomers), which seemed about to wrest the cultural and political authority they had won in the Reagan years from their hands.

There’s an unnerving parallel there, but that’s for another blog post.

The parallel is, of course, with what might just happen, or what we might fear may just happen, after a likely Obama election victory. Alarmism aside, there have been some smart and thoughtful observations by digby and others about emerging conservative efforts to portray a President Obama as nothing less than an illegitimate President. The last couple of weeks have also seen troubling manifestations of a mindset in which Obama is nothing less than an anti-American heir of Hitler and Mao.

The news addicts among you will already have seen this one:

Think Progress has the transcript:

[BRIAN WILLIAMS]: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist, under this definition, governor?

PALIN: (Sigh). There’s no question that Bill Ayers via his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that uh, it would be unacceptable. I don’t know if you’re going to use the word terrorist there.

“Have we really reached the point at which the Republican ticket wants to parse the meaning of the word “terrorist”?,” Steve Benen asks at the Washington Monthly. He also wonders, “does John McCain, who sat silently during the exchange, agree with this?”, before answering his own question: “Actually, he might. ThinkProgress noted a couple of weeks ago that McCain has “repeatedly voted against protecting Americans from domestic terrorists carrying out violence at abortion clinics.”

Violence against abortion providers, fig. 1, based on NAF data.

What kind of views does Palin’s take spring from? How widespread has the anti-abortion strand of domestic terrorism been? Are there any trends?

It's on! Ken Adelman vs Fred Barnes

Tune in for the Republican backstabbin’ meltdown special: in the new Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes has penned a piece about “the Palin divide,” tellingly titled “To Know Her Is To Respect Her” (h/t The Stump). He writes:

My advice is ignore the critics who know far less about Palin than she does about foreign policy. A good example is Ken Adelman, who headed the arms control agency in the Reagan administration. Adelman recently endorsed Obama and said he “would not have hired [Palin] for even a mid-level post in the arms control agency.” Well, I know both Palin and Adelman. And Ken, I’m sorry to tell you, but I think there are an awful lot of jobs in Washington that Palin would get before you.

Spotted on YouTube:

“It’s true: Barack is a secret SMOKER… He’s too WEAK to quit. WHY would we want to elect such a WEAK man PRESIDENT?”

Reality defies parody.

Alex Massie at The Debatable Land has been digging through the video archives of the Museum of the Moving Image at The Living Room Candidate. It’s a website devoted to historical campaign commercials, and “contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952.” And he’s come up with some true gems.

There’s classics like the relentlessly cheerful, ferociously flirty lounge singer doing her thing for Adlai Stevenson: “I love the Gov!“. (Sarah Palin didn’t invent the polit-power of the wink, you know.) There’s a bit of scare-mongering anno 1992 that made Massie quip, “Verily, Arkansas is a land visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. There’s a Barry Goldwater ad that starts off with 30 seconds of cult mayhem that would suit the best of Russ Meyer movie trailers; any moment you expect a warning about She-Devils on Wheels.

A strong contender for the most amazing find is the surprisingly psychedelic, hippie-go-lucky sing-a-long “Nixon Now” from 1972. An eerie illustration of the ad world’s reality inversion … catchy, though. (Weirdly enough, Nixonnow.com now is the website of a watch brand.) That one is overwhelmed still in the cutesy stakes by “the jaunty music and the fab 70s kitsch” of a Ford commercial from four years later – and much of it could have been a seventies ad for the car brand. (Bonus feel-good points for the unabashed inclusion of sundry happy ugly people: no shame of the natural back then! It’s like walking into a remote Slovak village.)

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of relativation, too. You thought Hillary’s 3 AM ad was an outrageous bit of scare-mongering? Ha! Nixon would have shown her a thing or two. You think McCain’s panders to evangelical America are worrying? Carter offered the real thing. Imagine the outcry if Republicans would air ads like those today.

But two of the ads Massie dug up stand out. Two videos that evoke distant eras, and yet are as topical as ever before. In fact, the Obama campaign could run touched up versions of them right now.

On a total aside in a post on McCain’s (lack of) campaign strategy, Daniel Nichanian at Campaign Diaries has this remark, between parentheses, about Sarah Palin’s recent telephone interview with Bill Kristol:

(Kristol acknowledged that it sounded like Palin was being coached by staffers while on the phone with him)

No way. She had staffers sitting in on a phone interview with a sycophantic columnist to make sure she didnt goof even in that setting?

But it’s true: in his complete softball of an interview, Kristol playfully asked Palin whether, “since she seemed to have enjoyed the debate, [..] she’d like to take this opportunity to challenge Joe Biden to another one.” Silence followed: “There was a pause, and I thought I heard some staff murmuring in the background (we were on speaker phones).” Eventually she passed on the notion of a challenge.

Now I’m a layman, I’ve never accompanied any candidate on his or her business — is this normal?