It seems that every Texas politician there is got his name in the news afterwards -- Perry, Hutcheson, and a couple of others. The state doesn't have jurisdiction over Fort Hood and most of the people there are only briefly state residents, so that's just media hog showboating.

He owes his position to a semen stain on Monica Lewinsky's dreaa.

I was astonished by Todd's responses to Greenwald as posted on this site. Often when media people are caught red-handed they either refuse to respond or else hem and haw, and fudge, and make excuses, and change the subject, but Todd basically stood totally behind what he had done.

I think that it's usually wrong to blame media misbehavior on incompetence, laziness, or stupidity. The groupthink explanation ("Heathers", "The Village") is a little closer to the truth, but the pure silliness would come to a quick stop if management wanted it to. Cowardice, subservience, and corruption explain the feebleness of some of the weak liberals and ex-liberals, and some people in the media (Judith Miller, George Will, Bob Novak) are conscious political agents.

As far as I know, none of these explanations cover Todd. He devoutly believes that the wonky, neutral, stenographic, process-oriented, establishment journalism he practices is a high and noble professional ideal -- and in fact something like this is what is taught in journalism school. Professionalization is not always a good thing.

To me Todd is more frightening than any of the others, because he's completely committed to a journalistic ideal which, if generally followed, effectively cripple democracy. A lot of the others are just opportiunists, but Todd is a true believer.

The Democratic Party has never served its supporters well except when it was pressured. That's how political parties work -- it's nothing special about the Democrats.

Why do the Blue Dogs, who defy Obama, get their asses kissed while the liberals supporting get sneered at? They get their asses kissed because they defy Obama. Not "even though" they defy Obama.

In politics you have to be combative when necessary, and too many Democrats are incapable of that. I think it's because too many Democrats are mugwumps from nice families where conflict is repressed, and too many of them have spent their lives in universities and other bureaucratic organizations where overt conflict is taboo.

Rahm Emmanuel is highly combative, but like the rest of the DLC, he's only effective against fellow Democrats.

Brooks is an insider, but I think of him promarily as a fluent, sly Republican operative. His job is to split off perhaps 1% of the Democratic support by relaying the Republican message to sensible moderates in a not-visibly-insane way. With hardly any exceptions, the real Republican spokesmen (Boehner, McConnell, et al) are unconvincing or repellent to anyone who has understanding of what's happening.

I suppose it's better to do the wrong thing for the right reasons than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, as the Bush Administration did. Call me simple-minded, though, but I'd prefer that Obama do the right thing for the right reasons. Just not appointing Geithner would have been a start.

Accusing Obama of being just like Bush will the new stupid media trick, even from media who were OK with Bush at the time. I'm already sick of it, and there's almost four years to go.

You get all these morons talking about how Minnesotans are stupid. That's often the entirety of their message, which doesn't make them seem at all smart themselves.

Or they parrot uninformed allegations for Coulter or the WSJ or Lott or one of the others, often using exactly the same words.

Sometimes I'd just say that if you accuse someone of a crime, you should have some factual evidence. Many seemed totally baffled by the concepts of "facts" and "evidence". They were pretty sure that they disagreed with me, but they weren't quite sure exactly what I had said. One called me a troll.

"If it smells fishy, it probably is fishy". "If you smell a rat, there's probably a rat around". Actual arguments I was given by people who had no detailed knowledge at all of what had actually happened.

There are already a couple of them on this thread, I see.

Imagine Wichita Falls Dallas Cowboys fans tweaking on meth after another blown game. That's the Republican internet intelligentsia at this point.

Joe:

Dispossession claims in living memory have priority over all that other crap. Forget that BS.

Someone here, possibly you, mentioned a thousand-year enmity. That's what I was addressing.

Israel controls our elections, our news media, our entertainment media, our finance, and our foreign policy. The head of Homeland Security is a dual-citizenship Israeli. Rahm Emanuel fought in the IDF while America was at war.

I hate that crap.

Yes, Glenn, the Jews are native to Israel, predating the Palestinians.

Nobody should care. France was originally Celtic. Turkey was originally Greek, Syrian Christian, etc. The Ukraine as originally Ossete. North Africa was originally Christian. Over the last 150 years or so Jews have displaced Arabs.

Native Americans aren't attacking us because they were destroyed as peoples by 1880. They only got their civil rights 50 or more years later. This is what is in store for the Palestinians, the way things are going.

There's no reason for the US to help out this process, except in the contextof partnering in an American imperial mission that most of us don't want.

Joe Frank: I suggest that the US shift its outsourcing to some country that causes us less grief.

I won't ask you to share the seekrit military information you have.