More Bush Favors for the Airline Industry

By Keith Schmitz

Remember all the brouhaha some years back about Bill Clinton's haircut on the runway at LAX? Sure you do but you probably don't remember that alleged tie-up of air traffic was a hoax given legs by the laziness of the "liberal" media.

Now it turns out George Bush ticked off 40,000 travelers when he blew through London on June 15th.

How many news cycles will be occupied by this story?

Clinton Rules -- McCain Edition

By Keith Schmitz

This week the New York Times committed the effrontery, the utter effrontery, of emitting a whiff of scandal over the possibility that GOP presumptive presidential nominee John McCain would be too cozy with lobbyists. The Times did however sexed it up with the hint that McCain was having an affair with one of the lobbyists.

But the result of The Times releasing the article unleashed the predictable firestorm from not only the right wing blogs but also the mainstream media, particularly Chris Matthews on Hardball, who has an almost embarrassing man-crush on McCain.

The incident prompts Media Matters to lay out the contrasting coverage afforded the Clintons by the press.

I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton but the unfavoritism press attention given her and the President is glaringly obvious. The New York Times in particular led the pack, putting out the slightest hint of scandal during WhiteWater.

Take the case of Katherine Willey. When the widow leveled her charges of foundling against Bill Clinton she got full treatment on 60 Minutes and splashy coverage days afterward. Her story, it turned out to be bogus and so fake that Ken Starr's successor Robert Ray in his wrap up report hinted that she purgered herself and could have been charged. The only coverage that got was in the back pages of USA Today.

So for your edification, here are the Clinton rules as spelled out by Media Matters:

1) If any part of an alleged scandal turns out to be true, the media behaves as though the entire story is true.

2) Media parse every statement by progressives in response to controversy, looking for something to ridicule -- whether the ridicule is fair or not.

Think the so-called Kerry botched joke, which Charlie Sykes tried to ride for all it is worth (hard because it was worth nothing).

3) Media parse every statement by progressives in response to controversy, looking for something to ridicule -- whether the ridicule is fair or not.

That is pretty much the way the mainstream media delivers it. And yet the ingrates on the right continue to attack the press.

Fortunately some in the press are taking a fresh look at McCain's relations with lobbyists. Hope they won't be scared off from the job.

Bill Clinton In MIlwaukee

By Keith Schmitz

The real American for Prosperity President Bill Clinton will be Milwaukee this morning. Doors open at 9:00.

Here's the place:

Italian Community Center
631 East Chicago St.
Milwaukee, WI 53202

The public of course is invited.

Hasta la Vista?

By Keith Schmitz

Viewing the binary world of TV talking heads on Morning Joe talking about how Barack Obama is losing Hispanic voters to Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Somehow this spells doom on the road to the White House.

All well and good...for now.

But as usual the cluelessness of millionaire pundits floats to the surface.

What in the world would make anyone think that in November Barack would lose the Hispanic vote to John McCain, or for that matter Hillary would lose the African-American vote?

McIlheran Watch: Blame Clinton First

There was a bit of a running joke among liberal blogs a few years ago about The Clenis™. The joke was that Republicans, eager to distract from all the bad things happening on their watch, would blame Bill Clinton--since, as we all know, Clinton's rhymes with "eenis" was the worst thing ever to happen to this country in general and the desk in the Oval Office in particular.

Economy slow? Clinton's fault. Terrorists attack despite a warning that "Bin Laden [is] Determined to Attack Inside United States"? Clinton. Military not prepared for an overextension into Afghanistan and Iraq? Bill did it.

The defense--but thankfully not the joke--has continued to be in fashion among Republicans. Sometimes, for example, you have to speak slowly when trying to explain that, no, Clinton never violated FISA or spied on Americans for national security purposes without a warrant. It doesn't stop them from trying, but I figure that the more often I get the truth out there, the more likely it is one or two will see the light.

Which brings us to one of my favorite dark-dwellers, Patrick McIlheran. I've let him off easy lately (you may have noticed that things slowed down here for a while), but his recent blogging offers up not one but two sad attempts at Blame Clinton First. If I were extra snarky, I'd say something about how his CDS (Clinton Derangement Syndrome) clouds his judgment, but, since I'm on a diet, I have to leave the extra snark alone.

Last night, in a commentary on the Wen Ho Lee lawsuit settlement, McIlheran says,

Truly, with every day we see new evidence of our government’s abuse of civil liberties.

Just last Friday we learned that the feds will pay a former nuclear weapons scientist $895,000 because the feds blabbed to newsmen that the scientist was being investigated for spying, which he was, though it appears he didn’t spy after all. [. . .] What has our country come to? Or, rather, what had it come to – I use past tense since the false accusation of spying against Wen Ho Lee took place in 1999, long before the dark era of George W. Bush ever began. The feds held Lee in solitary for nine months long before the oppressive John Ashcroft ever seized power at the Department of Justice, long before Dick Cheney ensconced himself at a secret location.

He's a little circumspect there, not actually using the C-word in his attempts to distract us from the current administration's questionable civil liberties practice, but he lays the groundwork for a Blame Clinton First defense pretty clearly.

He followed that post up with another one this afternoon, in which the naughty C-word slips from his fingertips:

My point was that Mr. Lee will be paid big bucks by you, dear taxpayer, because your government abused his civil rights — during the Clinton administration.

There it is. Makes you want to giggle a little, no?

This is because trying to blame the abuse of Wen Ho Lee's civil liberties--and the media's slander of the man, which caused the rest of the $1.6 million settlement--on Clinton would be like blaming a cancer patient for getting a tumor. Eric Boehlert sets us straight (my emphasis):

I wonder what Notra Trulock makes of last week's news? A discredited former Energy Department intelligence officer who often came across as a Clinton-hating dittohead, Trulock served as a key government source throughout the Lee witch hunt. (The charges against Lee crumbled in court after Lee had already spent 278 days in solitary confinement.) Trulock was the source some news organizations didn't want to reveal in court and the man who led key reporters around by their noses, spinning fantastic tales about Lee's diabolical deeds; half-baked tales that were often faithfully retold in the pages of the most important newspapers in America. Read: The New York Times. Last week's settlement might have included five news organizations--ABC News, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post--but the Wen Ho Lee saga has always been about the woeful conduct of the Times and its embarrassing reliance on someone like Trulock who wielded such an obvious partisan ax as he chased after Lee, and by extension the Clinton administration, which Trulock argued was somehow protecting Lee's espionage.

Got it? The Clinton Administration didn't destroy Wen Ho Lee; a Clinton-hater destryoed Wen Ho Lee in order to destroy Clinton.

Maybe someday we'll learn that General Hayden, a principal architect of Bush's program to eavesdrop on Americans without the legally required warrant, is just a Bush-hater out to take down Bush, like that Trulock fellow . . .

Mara Liasson's "impeachment backlash"

Driving home, I heard NPR reporter and regular Fox News guest Mara Liasson offering her take on the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings about Russ Feingold's censure motion, in a segment that NPR is calling "Calls for Censure Show a Divide in Democratic Party." Now, I've had my say about this already (twice), and Liasson was, in fact, careful to say that Feingold enjoyed the support of most registered Democrats in polls. She made clear that the divide in the party came not between the "activist base" and the mainstream, but rather between Democrats and their elected representatives.

However, in the discussion about the spinelessness (my word) of Senate Democrats, Liasson said something that made me yell at the radio. "It may be," she said (I'm paraphrasing), "that the Deomcratic leadership is remembering the backlash against Republicans from the Clinton impeachment."

"Impeachment backlash?!?" I screamed at her. "What backlash?"

I don't know if there's some kind of conventional wisdom out there that says that Republicans somehow suffered mightily at the hands of an angry anti-impeachment public, but I, having lived through the period in question, certainly do not recall any moment since, oh, 1992-ish, when Republicans were not pretty firmly in power. "Backlash my foot," I thought.

But, due to a conspiracy of global proportions against me such that I can neither blog nor Google from my car, I had to wait until I got home to verify the truthiness of my gut feelings. Turns out, my gut did not steer me wrong. Despite dire predictions before the 1998 mid-terms, the election at the height of pre-impeachment fever featured no backlash at all. The House had a shift of just five seats, a small number given historical trends. The Senate changed not at all.

Well, what about the 2000 elections, after the actual impeachment itself? Good question. Turns out, looking at the same links as before (since, you know, those charts start in 1789 and go until today), you can see that Democrats gained a single seat, meaning between the time impeachment talk began until when Clinton left office, a paltry six seats changed in the House. In fact, noted Congressional elections expert (he uses footnotes!) Gary Jacobson wrote,

Most prominent among the handful of incumbents who did attract vigorous opposition were Republicans from Democratic-leaning districts who had defied the manifest wishes of a majority of their constituents by voting to impeach Clinton. Three of the four Republican incumbents who lost fell into this category: California's Brian Bilbray and James Rogan, both representing districts where Clinton had won 55 percent of the major-party vote in 1996, and Jay Dickey of Arkansas, representing a district where Clinton had won 66 percent. But Republicans as a group escaped punishment for their widely unpopular move to oust the president by the simple fact that it failed. Most voters got what they wanted--continuation of the Clinton presidency--and saw no reason to punish Republicans wholesale for the attempt. Just as good times helped Clinton to survive the impeachment process, the strong economy probably helped protect the Republicans in Congress from any impeachment backlash by encouraging public contentment with the status quo.

The senate is a slightly different story in 2000, since Republicans lost five seats. But Jacobson explains it this way:

The Democrats' gains in the Senate did not, however, reflect any national partisan trend, but rather the absence of one. Turnover is typically higher in Senate elections. On average, Senate incumbents are about three times as likely to lose as House incumbents. [. . .]

Senators run on a six-year rather than a two-year cycle, which can also lead to different patterns of competition in House and Senate races. [. . .] The 2000 Senate elections were the first test for several of the staunchly conservative Republicans who were first elected on the strong Republican tide of 1994. Three of the five Republican losers in 2000 were members of this class--John Ashcroft of Missouri, Rod Grams of Minnesota, and Spencer Abraham of Michigan. All three were burdened with images that put them well to the right of their constituents. Thus part of the reason Democrats pulled even in the Senate is that the strong Republican tide that had prevailed in 1994 was no longer running. [. . .]

Overall, twenty-four of thirty-four states cast a plurality of their votes for Senate and presidential candidates of the same party, precisely the same as in 1992 and 1996. Consistency in Senate and presidential voting has returned to the levels that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s, in contrast to the 1968-1988 period, when typically only about half the states were won by the same party's Senate and presidential candidates.

So, again, what backlash?

And let's not forget the reason Jacobson suggests that Republicans did not suffer backlash: Impeachment failed, meaning Clinton stayed in office, which is what the public wanted. Today, given Bush's poll numbers, I think it's pretty clear that the public wants some kind of consequences for Bush. Thinking back to those polls a couple of weeks ago, cited in my own posts about Feingold's mainstreamity linked above, there is a sizable chunk of people--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents--who want impeachment or censure. Our Democratic leadership needs to stop running from its shadow here and start, you know, leading.

There will be no backlash, only praise.

Memory Lane, Presidential Wrongdoing Edition

Remember this classic, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board about Clinton?

Editorial: Impeachment is premature, unfair

It's easy to see Republicans' point in seeking impeachment against the president for perjury and obstructing justice. But their actions are ill-advised on a number of fronts, from the purely political to mere ineffectiveness. Let us suggest, however, that this time, Republicans are premature. This quest for impeachment, though no doubt driven by principle, has something of a tilting-at-windmills quality that will only distract from more urgent business.

Impeachment of a president has been done only once before. It was a doubtful tool in that instance. It is even more doubtful now. That's because it is occurring before there has been a proper vetting of whether the president has committed an illegal act.

Republicans are correct that President Clinton does appear to have perjured himself and obstructed the investigation into his wrongdoing. But an impeachment vote now could be self-satisfying for purely political reasons on both sides of the aisle. Its outcome, however, is preordained and will be a wholly unnecessary distraction from the real business at hand--determining if Clinton willfully and knowingly violated laws.

Of course you don't remember it, because the paper never wrote it. Back in 1998, the paper said "Let impeachment proceedings begin":

There are compelling reasons why the country would be better served if the shortcuts of resignation and censure or reprimand are avoided. [. . .] Instead, Congress--beginning with the House--needs to begin the impeachment process and conduct it responsibly and expeditiously.

They were ready to get on with impeachment. The paper did, I will admit, demand that the hearings be "dignified," but they seemed displeased that Clinton was let off the hook: "Yet, there can be no satisfaction with the Senate outcome among Americans who honestly believe the president acted like a fool and demeaned the high office to which they twice elected him," they wrote. "To its everlasting disgrace, the Senate could not even muster the courage to at least censure the man who brought such dishonor to the nation in what will forever be known as the Monica Lewinsky Affair."

Everlasting disgrace be damned, I suppose, when it comes to Russ Feingold's measure to censure President Bush for his admitted violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Even though the paper admits today that "the Constitution does not empower the president to ignore those laws he chooses," they will not stand up for the Constitution's demands that Congress exercise its authority on the matter. Instead, they write, "Censure is premature, unfair."

However, I suspect that somewhere Russ Feingold is smiling, since towards the front of the paper, he says that "It's doing what I had hoped. As difficult as this is, everybody is now talking again about" the president's breaking of the law. To be fair, even the Journal Sentinel is talking about it; the headline by itself on the editorial today (calling censure "unfair") doesn't quite carry the full weight of the demands the editors to make about the need for real investigation and oversight:

Congress has refused to entertain a meaningful investigation into National Security Agency wiretapping and has never adequately investigated whether intelligence was manipulated to rush a nation to war.

And, still, there is some hope that enough public outrage--perhaps spurred by midterm elections--or further revelations could finally cause Congress to find backbone instead of a way to make the law fit White House actions, rather than vice versa.

Congress has displayed breathtaking unwillingness or ineptitude on the wiretapping issue. That's why it's time it launched an independent investigation.

Calling Feingold's motion for censure "unfair," though, only provides fodder for the radio talkers and right half of the Cheddarsphere. It provides cover for people like Representative F. Jim Sensenbrenner, whose House Judiciary Committee can and should be investigating the matter. It provides an out for anyone who still wants to look the other way while this White House gathers power on an unprecedented scale.

Calling it unfair also makes the editorial board look like fools, since, if that was what Russ was really after--renewed calls for a genuine investigation--he just got it. He wins this round, even if censure never happens.