to manipulate, intimidate, fool or entice establishment media reporters to spin stories its way, facts be damned. Whether they do this because they're right-wing ideologues who want to help their "side", because they're weak and foolish and stupid and thus easily manipulated, because they still fear these people, because they still seem to think that Bush is president and thus he and his people have to be stroked, or perhaps because Obama has given them absolutely no reason to "switch sides", so to speak, and simply do their jobs--i.e. honestly and thoroughly investigate and report on the facts, consequences to powerful people be damned--it's clear that they're still doing what they did under Bush, which is to report and spin the news in a way that favors certain powerful people, even if it means grossly distorting what actually happened.

Personally, I think that this is basically just a lingering remnant of the 40+ year effort by certain far-right elements of the GOP to shape public opinion by any and all means necessary, the oft-discussed "Right Wing Noise Machine", or RWNM, that manifested itself through the intimidation, manipulation and enticement of weak, stupid and unscrupulous journalists in all media forms, the planting of paid and volunteer shills in the form of "pundits", editorialists, columnists and "experts" in the establishment media (e.g. the DoD's paid military expert program intended to promote the Iraq war), the creation of a vast network of "think tanks", media outlets, educational programs and even schools, and, I now also, I believe, the planting of shills and astroturfers and concern trolls in the blogosphere.

Articles such as this, or Bumiller's, are the result of this effort, I am thoroughly convinced. The actual reporters might not literally be doing this in order to help these Bushies, but they're clearly being manipulated into doing so, and going along with it quite willingly. They couldn't possibly be so stupid as to not know what they're doing. They're just weak and unprincipled hacks desperate to get stories out that appear to "break" some controversial new angle on an old story (and maybe, just maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get invited to have a nice cool Starbucks latte with Mika and Joe!--on a show which, obviously, is part of this RWNM).

I'm not at all surprised that this is going on. What I am surprised at is that it's still working, and that Obama either doesn't care, or isn't able or willing to do anything about it. The disconnect between what he gloriously says in public in his now truly Orwellian need to be in front of the cameras making a speech every single day, and what he and his staff actually do away from the cameras, is simply unreal. I don't know what Obama thinks that he's doing, but what he's actually doing is obvious, which is to give in to, one by one, nearly all of the Bush era policies that he publically continues to denounce, or refuse to properly investigate and deal with them if they were illegal. It is, in many ways, a Potemkin administration, and the appearance of articles such as these is symptomatic of that, as much so as are the many public appearances of Dick and Liz Cheney. They are filling a vacuum that Obama has allowed to exist.

This is what happens when you have a president who, for all his noble words and even intentions, is simply not a fighter. As someone said to me the other day on Daily Kos, he's the type of basketball player who likes to take safe perimeter shots but is unwilling to move the ball in the lane and draw a foul. He simply doesn't like to get bruised and bloodied up. And his enemies sense that in him. He could put an end to this media narrative that torture works, that it's not illegal, that it's not even torture but "enhanced interrogation techniques", that everyone approved of it and that it saved lives, by going on the offensive against those who endorsed, authorized and engaged in such crimes. But he won't, because it's too politically risky, and he's got other priorities. Which, unsurprisingly, he's also showing an unwillingness to fight for and do the right thing, on health care, banking, stimulus spending, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And such articles are simply filling it. And it's now Obama's fault that it exists. By trying to sidestep and avoid dealing with these issues, he's allowing the other side to win. And it is winning, not only legally, but PR-wise.

When did the Democratic party get taken over by cowardly and unprincipled technocrats?