Bill Kristol on The Huffington Post

Greg Mitchell: Bono Replacing Bill Kristol at New York Times ?

2009-01-09T13:56:01Z

Well, not quite, but the U2 frontman will be writing op-eds for the Times and its Web site -- and podcasting -- starting this Sunday. The fate of Bill Kristol, meanwhile, at the paper should be decided any day. His one-year contract is now up.

The Times announced in a release this morning that Bono, the singer, writer and anti-poverty activist (among other things), has been invited to write op-ed columns for the paper, beginning this Sunday in print and online. He will also do podcasts and cover a broad range of subjects. A few lines are on the horizon and soon it will be Sunday, Bono, Sunday.

"What an honor," said Bono. "I've never been great with the full stops or commas. Let's see how far we can take this."

"Bono is a great addition to our Op-Ed line-up," said Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times. "He is an extraordinary man who thinks deeply about his art and the major issues confronting the world. His writing will reflect that."

Actually, this news first emerged last fall when Rosenthal chatted about it while speaking at Columbia University. At that time, he spoke of six to ten columns for Bono during the year with subjects including, besides political issues, the music of Frank Sinatra.

Asked what Bono would be paid, he said then, "nothing."

The Times observed in its release: "Bono has been a leader in the fight against AIDS and poverty in Africa since his initial involvement in the debt cancellation campaign of 1998, when he began lobbying governments across the G8 to free poor countries from odious debts so they could spend more on health and education." And it went on from there to detail his other work for the ONE foundation and much else.

Maybe you'd like to speculate on what his first column or general tone might be? Kristofian? Will it top Paul Krugman? Even Better Than The Shrill Thing? Or is he merely, as he sang in his "New York" song, "staying on to figure out my mid life crisis."

Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher and his most recent book on Iraq and the media is "So Wrong for So Long."

Chez Pazienza: One Last Look Back: The 10 Most Ridiculous, Shameful, or Generally Unfortunate People and Events of 2008

2009-01-07T11:12:05Z

Well, it could've been worse.

As 2008 mercifully ends, we're left to ponder a year in which the real and the surreal were pretty much indistinguishable, where insanity actually became tedium, and where every silver lining was eclipsed by a brand new dark cloud. Sure, O.J.'s going to prison, but think about the absurdist comedy-of-errors it took to finally put him there. Yeah, gas is technically affordable again, but who has money to make car payments -- and for that matter, will anyone in Detroit still be in business in the coming months should you, for whatever reason, feel like buying American? True, Barack Obama was elected president in a political upheaval that can only be described as epochal, but, well, you don't really think Cheney's just going to quietly vacate his office come January 20th, do you? Not when construction on the new Death Star is so far from completion.

2008 will be remembered as the year that a simple "hockey mom" from Alaska, an ex-beauty pageant contestant and political neophyte, paved the way for history and helped prove once and for all that anyone can ascend to the highest levels of government in the United States -- even a black man. It will be remembered as the year that Beyoncé inexplicably demanded that everyone call her "Sasha Fierce" and Britney Spears demanded that somebody call her an ambulance. Then leave her alone. Then give her back her kids. Then buy her album. 2008 was the year that Michael Phelps won enough Olympic gold to make him the most financially secure man in America. It was the year that the flagging economy, taxpayer-funded bailouts and a holographic image of Will.i.am dominated the news coverage. It was the year that Katherine Heigl could claim to be better than the material being given to her and actually be right (only because that material happened to be the scripts for Grey's Anatomy). It was the year that an unknown plumber who wasn't really a plumber became a household name and a singer who was really an unknown bartender became the latest American Idol. Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards fell from grace and turned into national punchlines and Heath Ledger died tragically but still had the last, and lasting, laugh. Prop 8 passed and civil rights lost.

Everything changed. And not much changed at all.

So, as we watch that giant ball drop like the value of your 401k, ushering in 2009, let's take a look back in anger at the people and events that make us think that no matter what's to come, it damn sure can't be any worse than what we've already been through. In the words of Crowded House: Don't scream -- it's over.

That's not how the song goes? Well it should be.

We'll start at the bottom -- literally.

10. Madonna

Title: Cinquagenarian Entertainer, Gay Icon, Homewrecker

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Cymbalta, Viagra, Geritol

The Facts: You've really got to hand it to Madonna. Most waning sexpots adopt a nauseatingly pretentious air of faux-class in their twilight years (and indeed that's the territory Madge seemed to be staking out exclusively for a while). But only the truly self-absorbed can manage the kind of scandalous second-wind that catapults them back into the tabloids for breaking up not one but two celebrity marriages at age 50. 2008 was a banner year for the Immaterial Girl: She incomprehensibly got herself inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, very comprehensibly got divorced, had a hit single whose only appealing characteristic was the fact that its video was thoughtful enough to feature a large digital clock which counted down the time until the song finally ended and something else came on, and caused "Controversy™" by bombastically comparing George Bush and John McCain to Hitler and Mussolini. Oh yeah, and she brashly flaunted the apparently Benjamin Button-esque nature of her sex drive by fucking Alex Rodriguez and helping to land him in divorce court (Note to A-Rod: Being able to say that you're nailing Madonna doesn't carry quite the amount of clout that it used to. You may as well be the new bass player for Bon Jovi -- the guy who missed the stadium tours but gets to be on board during the state fair years). In between all of this -- somewhere in that hectic schedule -- Madonna found the time to get in a work out. Quite a few, actually. As in, she looks like a piece of driftwood that's been beaten by the ocean and left in the sun for a hundred years or so.

Mitigating Factor: Her succubine presence and presumed vagina dentata probably spared the country the hell of another Yankees World Series run.

"By This Time Next Year, She'll Be..." Post-menopausal.

Dishonorable Mention: Ben Stein, who pulled off the somewhat laudable feat of being on the wrong side of almost every argument in 2008, notably culminating in the theatrical and DVD release of the documentary Expelled, in which Stein insurgently railed against Darwin's Theory of Evolution in favor of the unadulterated nonsense that is Intelligent Design. I wrote it at the time but it bears repeating: The SNL writing staff, circa 1977, couldn't have created a more audaciously comical premise than Ben Stein -- a man so square he craps cubes -- writing "I Will Not Question Authority" on a blackboard while dressed like Angus Young. Stein is a Dangerous Mind only if you see mark-to-market accounting as a ballsy show of defiance, which makes him the perfect impertinent hero for the God-said-it-I-believe-it set.

9. The American 'Tween

Title: Consumer, Arbiter of All Entertainment, Not the One Paying the Goddamned Cell Phone Bill

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Ritalin (for the Kid), Xanax (for the Parents)

The Facts: If you're the relatively sane parent of a 13 year old girl, chances are you love the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, right? No, of course you don't. What you've done is ceded your own tastes to those of your kids, who robotically inundate you with the same crappy music, movies and TV shows that Disney giddily bombards them with 24/7. This wouldn't be such a big deal were it not for the fact that your children are no longer harmless islands unto themselves; thanks to the internet and cell phone text messaging, they've coalesced into a hive mind and, what's worse, one that's turned them into a giant conduit/amplifier for whatever garbage is being cleverly and cynically marketed in their direction. In our new Wiki-world, those with the loudest voices can dictate what we all see and hear -- they can literally adjust reality to suit their needs and, well, have you ever heard how loud a 'Tween girl screams for the fucking Jonas Brothers? In 2008, the 'Tween demographic asserted its authority in unprecedented ways, forcing the rest of us to endure a seemingly endless cavalcade of Disney "Stepford Teen" entertainment, from High School Musical 3 to Miley and, by extension, her father -- the honest-to-Christ most spectacular douchebag on the planet -- Billy Ray Cyrus. We listened to the music, paid to see the movies and bought every manner of merchandise until our kids became walking billboards for this shit. Parents willingly allowed a million little Veruca Salts to inflict their will on the world, and did nothing to stop it.

Mitigating Factor: Well, they did almost nothing to stop it. David Cook somehow managed to wrestle the American Idol crown away from frumpy, willowy-voiced 'Tween fave David Archuleta. That's gotta be a step in the right direction.

"By This Time Next Year, She'll Be..." More than likely, pregnant. Or a member of the Pussycat Dolls. Or maybe suckered into sex with a guy like Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, who'll then turn around and post naked pictures of her on the internet so that she can be just like her erstwhile idol, Vanessa Hudgens. But none of this will happen before she drags you kicking and screaming to see The Jonas Brothers: 3D in February.

Dishonorable Mention: Speaking of graduating to the big leagues of noxious teen entertainment, MTV's The Hills is so utterly devoid of any value whatsoever that the craft services truck could catch on fire, turning the entire cast into running, screaming balls of flame, and the correct response would be to sigh and flip your pillow over to the cool side. And among that show's collection of future has-beens, no two have been more overexposed than Spencer Pratt and his idiot pretend girlfriend, Heidi Montag. Their tabloid-friendly relationship, a triumph of post-modern meta-reality, peaked just a couple of weeks ago when the two returned from their fake fake elopement to Mexico to engineer a fake real wedding in a Beverly Hills courtroom, which the court happily went along with while presumably telling a truly in love gay couple to go fuck themselves.

8. CNN's "Hologram" Technology

Title (On the Record): The New Standard in Live News Coverage and Proof of CNN's Journalistic Dominance; Title (Off the Record): A Much Cooler Way to Spend the Salaries of 21 People

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Primidone, Lasik, Changing the Channel to the Jim Lehrer NewsHour or BBC World News America

The Facts: The ability to lay claim to the biggest "What the Fuck?" moment of the seemingly interminable coverage of the 2008 presidential election is a little like being able to say that you're the gayest man at a Scissor Sisters show. An exhausted America had already endured approximately 623 sponsored debates (including ABC's unforgivable gossip-and-conjecture-fest), the "lipstick on a pig" non-story and of course Fox's famous "terrorist fist jab" comment by the time election night proper rolled around. Yet CNN, obviously saving the best for last, somehow managed to make all of that inanity seem like the work of amateurs by pulling out its secret weapon when it really mattered. And so, on the night that millions tuned in to find out who would become the 44th president of the United States, CNN gave them something they'd really be able to tell their grandkids about: an uncomfortable conversation between Anderson Cooper and a supposedly holographic image of the Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am. It was Vaudevillian theater in its purest and most ridiculous form, especially when you considered that the "hologram" in question wasn't really a hologram at all and that, as Wolf Blitzer had done earlier in the evening, Anderson Cooper was essentially talking to himself on national television. Taken on its own merits, this would've seemed like nothing more than a silly ratings-grabbing gimmick, and indeed it was swiftly and roundly panned as being just that. But the fact that it was the culmination of a garish year-long spending spree by CNN -- one that was immediately and conspicuously followed by a series of high-profile layoffs that included respected flesh-and-blood veterans like Miles O'Brien, Kelli Arena and the network's entire Science and Technology Unit -- made it clear that network president John "Diddy" Klein's priorities and his head were in pretty much the same place: his ass. When all was said and done, an interview with the New York Observer in which Klein had bragged less than two weeks before the layoffs, "We can afford more people on our air and off our air. So, goddamn it, we're going to have more people," would become the icing on the irony cake and an almost amusing epitaph for those who'd lost their jobs. But hey, at least audiences could still count on being able to tune in and be dazzled by the pretty special effects.

Mitigating Factor: As far as anyone knows, the CNN "hologram" was built without the use of illegal Mexican labor -- which gives Lou Dobbs one less thing to bitch about.

"By This Time Next Year, It'll Be..." Obsolete.

Dishonorable Mention: Former wunderkind and current wunderkind (if you define "wunderkind" as a megalomaniacal tool who's inexplicably been allowed to run a television network into the ground with zero accountability) Jeff Zucker and Ben Silverman, respectively. The two top dogs at NBC, Zucker and Silverman bear most of the responsibility for making the network what it is today: 4th place. The former's handiwork can be seen in the almost preternatural level of cross-promotional whoring between NBC Universal entities (the Today show interviews contestants on Bravo's Top Chef who cook for the cast of The Mummy: Tomb of Whatever the Hell using GE appliances); the latter's handiwork could be seen in network television's tribute to the absolute lowest common denominator, The NBC All American Summer. Beyond that, well, his handiwork can't really be seen unless you're lucky enough to nab a seat next to him at the bar of whichever exclusive party he happens to be attending at that moment. Put it this way: Silverman bears an uncanny resemblance to "Girls Gone Wild" CEO and overgrown frat-boy Joe Francis -- and the similarities don't end there.

7. Joe Lieberman

Title: Independent (as in, He Doesn't Have a Friend in the World) Senator from Connecticut, Political Opportunist, Embarrassing Jewish Stereotype, Guy You Never Want to Take Handicapping Advice From, Mr. Excitement

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Dexedrine, Pharmaceutical Cocaine

The Facts: It takes a special kind of personality to go from being one party's candidate for vice president to being the go-to political hitman for the opposing party in the span of just eight years -- and that personality is, apparently, no personality at all. 2008 was the year that Joe Lieberman finally proved just how shamelessly and entirely he was willing to screw over those who'd spent a good portion of their careers supporting him. Like a desperate high school girl who flits from one clique to another sharing gossip in an effort to be liked, he'd spent years playing both sides of the fence and every conceivable angle hoping to stay one step ahead of political irrelevancy. But it wasn't until the last few months of last year's presidential race that the true evanescence of Lieberman's loyalty -- and therefore the general worthlessness of his friendship -- became clear to pretty much everyone. Old Droopy didn't just turn his back on the Democrats; he took center stage at the Republican National Convention. He didn't just support John McCain; he insinuated that Barack Obama might be a Marxist and, what's more, questioned his overall ability to lead (a somewhat laughable implication, considering the source). In the end, though, Lieberman's gambit didn't pay off -- so now, in wholly expected fashion, his one-time campaign battle cry, "Joementum," has taken on an entirely new meaning: "Joe meant... um..."

Mitigating Factor: Yup, it sure is fun watching as Joe sucks up to the Democrats, blissfully unaware that being their short-leashed bitch will almost certainly wind up being more humiliating than banishment to the Beltway's Phantom Zone.

"By This Time Next Year, He'll Be..." Exactly what he is right now: A lame duck. On the other hand, a couple of years from now you'll probably be able to find him trying to send back the Reuben at Ben's Kosher Deli in Boca. Or maybe on the Fox News Channel, where he'll be a full-time contributor.

Dishonorable Mention: Zimbabwean, ahem, "President" Robert Mugabe. To twist a line from Craig Ferguson, you know what Zucker and Silverman are doing to NBC? Well Mugabe's doing that to an entire country.

6. Tyra Banks

Title: TV Host, Former Supermodel (Current Plus-Size Model), Self-Parody, Harbinger of the Apocalypse

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Topamax, Potassium Cyanide

The Facts: There's no better caricature of fame in the 21st century and all that it represents than Tyra Banks. No one is more pristine an example of an entity whose entire existence is about the relentless pursuit of self-obsession simply for its own sake. Seriously, name one thing Tyra has done -- not just in 2008 (although it really was an ascendant year for the "fierce" one), but ever -- that benefited someone else more than it did her. Submerse yourself in Tyra's admittedly mesmeric vortex of televised self-love long enough and you actually begin to subscribe to the alternate universe she inhabits: one where she's the reigning queen of pop culture, where people actually believe that being a shallow and superficial fashion icon is an entirely noble endeavor, and where words like "booty and "badonkadonk" can be uttered in the same sentence as "Mr. President" and no one finds it the least bit unusual. Like her idol in the talk show game and rival in the battle for media ubiquity, Oprah, Tyra Banks has an affinity for taking any subject, really anything, and somehow twisting it inside out until the focus winds up being her and only her. But whereas Oprah has mastered the art of self-promotion to such an extent that it's become an almost exquisite thing to behold, Tyra's strictly a novice, clumsily bludgeoning the conversation -- to say nothing of the audience -- then propping up its limp body and putting her arm around it like some kind of trophy. And that's just on her talk show. Best we not even get into the grotesque minstrel show of gay and urban elitist clichés that is America's Next Top Model.

Mitigating Factor: Two words: Joel McHale

"A Year From Now, She'll Be..." If she has her way, holding Oprah's severed head aloft on the end of a spike and bathing in the blood draining from it.

Dishonorable Mention: Send the children out of the room; they shouldn't be exposed to the kind of unrestrained venom I'm about to unleash: CNN's Nancy Grace is the most loathsome, feckless troll to currently, unfathomably have a forum on national television. She's a vile, unscrupulous monster who peddles morbid prurience like a five-dollar streetwalker and whose brand of rank solipsism is matched only by her near-sociopathic disregard for the lives she's ruined and exploited and by her apparent contempt for the tenets of responsible journalism (to say nothing of basic human decency). Nancy didn't do anything in 2008 that she hasn't done in years past, but then again she wasn't unceremoniously kicked off the air either -- hence, a place on this list. Incidentally, if that kid I mentioned a few seconds ago happens to be white and cute and disappears on his or her way out of the room, you can expect to see a hell of a lot of Nancy in the near future.

5. The Death of Heath Ledger

Title: Unqualified Shame

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: USE ONLY AS DIRECTED

The Facts: Certainly the single most startling event in the world of entertainment in 2008, Heath Ledger's sudden and untimely death last January initially left millions scratching their heads in shell-shocked confusion. But what made it truly noteworthy was that as questions were answered and the facts began revealing themselves, it all provided little comfort and almost nothing in the way of macabre titillation. The fact is that Heath Ledger was so damn talented -- his death, such a tragic loss -- that even the typically scandal-hungry public found nothing to revel in, snicker about, or wag its collective finger at. The whole thing was just so sad. So heartbreaking. There were the constantly televised and published images of Ledger with his young daughter, Matilda, and the ugly debate over her financial security; the threats of protest at Ledger's memorial service by the reprehensible psychopaths of the Westboro Baptist Church; the grief of watching his past films -- most memorably, his astonishing and anguished performance in Brokeback Mountain -- and realizing the true measure of what was lost. And then, of course, came The Dark Knight -- and Heath Ledger's awesome, iconic reimagining of the Joker. It's a testament to the man's excellence as an actor that we could become completely lost in the character he created while he was onscreen and really only remember as the credits rolled that we'd never see him again.

Mitigating Factor: It seems sickening to find a silver lining to this cloud, and really there isn't one. That said, it will be an ironic final tribute to Ledger's abundant talents that Warner Brothers can't bankrupt the power and novelty of his Joker character by milking it to death in sequel after sequel (see: Hannibal Lecter, Jack Sparrow, the last two Matrix films). It was lightning in a bottle -- and it gets to remain that.

"A Year From Now, He'll Be..." If there's any justice in the world, an Academy Award winner.

Honorable Mention: Although many would rightly argue that Tim Russert's sudden death by heart attack had a much bigger impact across a larger swath of the public, for my money the shocking suicide of writer, columnist, and masterful cultural observer David Foster Wallace was a loss of staggering proportions. Like Heath Ledger, Wallace was a brilliant practitioner of his craft -- at once comical, challenging, and an unparalleled chronicler of the human condition. And, like Ledger, Wallace suffered alongside his art without in any way intending to. Unlike Ledger, though, David Foster Wallace lived with the pain inside himself until he simply couldn't anymore. He took his own life after battling depression for more than 20 years. His work, however, endures -- with his masterpiece, 1996's Infinite Jest, deservedly hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written.

4. Rod Blagojevich

Title: Governor of Illinois (For Now), "Entrepreneur," Asshole

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: A Huge Rail of Blow Done Off a Stripper's Boob and Washed Down with Five or Six Quaaludes

The Facts: Alright, Andy -- enough already. Listen, man, it was fucking brilliant -- and I mean brilliant -- but it's time to take off the ridiculous outfit and just admit that it's you. I mean, we already knew you were a genius even before you faked your death back in '84, but obviously that was just the set-up for your biggest and best piece of performance art yet -- the greatest practical joke of all time. Only you could pull off a character like this and somehow get people to buy it: A foul-mouthed, belligerent and shamelessly corrupt politician; a Serbian-American with an Adrian Zmed circa 1981 haircut; a guy who's first name is actually a euphemism for "dick." Man, how the hell did you get away with this for so long? I mean, you publicly fought with your own cabinet, tried to smuggle flu vaccine past the FDA, threatened to beat the shit out of state senator Mike Jacobs, and called yourself "the first African-American governor of Illinois." Did you finally decide to go all out and try to sell Barack Obama's Illinois senate seat when you realized that no one was picking up on the gag -- or did you really just want to see how far you could push it? Either way -- fucking magnificent, dude. You're gonna go down in the history books. We're talking legendary. One problem, though -- you really need to cop to this thing, and soon. Really. 'Cause the alter-ego you created and have been nurturing for the past fifteen years or so is now facing a 78-page federal indictment -- and probably a shitload of jail time. Then again, knowing you Andy, that's all part of the joke. Genius.

Mitigating Factor: Not a one.

"A Year From Now, He'll Be..." Inmate #2259836

Dishonorable Mention: Proof that the left and the right are basically interchangeable, particularly at the "Craven Political Operative" level, Mark Penn was the Democrats' answer to Karl Rove before getting his substantial ass kicked out of the Hillary Clinton campaign in April of 2008. The CEO of public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller -- in other words, the top liar at a firm whose bread-and-butter is lying as creatively as possible and doing it inexhaustibly -- Penn is one of those guys whose physical appearance perfectly reflects his personality: In this case, he looks like he should have a bikini-clad Princess Leia chained to his bulbous frame somewhere while a little Muppet-like minion cackles mindlessly from the rafters. It was Penn's brilliant strategy to suggest that Hillary Clinton and her surrogates bring up Barack Obama's past drug experimentation whenever possible, and it was he who took the are-you-fucking-kidding-me prize by saying that Obama couldn't take the Democratic nomination by winning a lot of states he deemed not to be "major." Penn managed to drag the campaign of the famously opportunistic Clinton even deeper into the mud, if such a thing were possible. Oh yeah, and he did it all while his firm was busy repping PR-challenged organizations like Blackwater and Countrywide and lobbying for a free trade deal with Colombia that Clinton herself was against.

3. Kanye West

Title: Voice of a Generation (Just Ask Him), Auto-Tune Afficionado, Little Boy Who Just Wants To Be Loved, Douchebag

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Zoloft, Stick One Ball of Cotton in Each Ear

The Facts: Let's just say it: Kanye West isn't nearly as talented, important, or distinguished as he thinks he is. He couldn't be. It's simply impossible to be a carbon-based life form and have achieved the kind of preeminence Kanye insists he has. If he were even half the omnipotent cultural juggernaut he believes himself to be, he would've shed his physical form and morphed into a phantasmal ball of pure energy years ago. For the most part, 2008 didn't really bring anything new from Kanye that we hadn't already come to expect: There were the usual boasts about possibly being the most influential human being since Christ; the inescapable guest appearances on the records of lesser musicians (the year's nadir being his irritating cameo on the already irritating-as-hell American Boy); and of course the petulant whining about how no one shows him the adequate level of respect and everyone is out to get him because he's black. But toward the end of the year, we were treated to a new, yet not even slightly unexpected, side of Kanye: that of the self-loathing mega-star. Certainly, the death of his mother took an emotional toll on him. But the supposed result of it and a few other recent personal catastrophes -- his latest release, 808s and Heartbreak -- plays exactly the way you'd figure an "introspective" album from Kanye West would. Even at its quietest and ostensibly least obtrusive, the whole thing exudes its creator's legendarily gargantuan ego. Kanye can do self-pity; God knows we've heard it from him before. But after being asked to tolerate his narcissistic swagger for so long, it's just not very easy to feel sorry for him. And 808s, with it's ironically bombastic sadness, makes Kanye seem all the more like the kid who, even at his lowest suicide-threatening point, is just looking for attention.

Mitigating Factor: You know what almost did make me feel sorry for Kanye? His performance on Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks back -- when his Auto-Tune malfunctioned and he was left standing there onstage, looking and sounding like a really lousy karaoke act.

"By This Time Next Year, He'll Be..." Complaining about (fill in the blank).

Dishonorable Mention: Speaking of ego-driven bombast -- you can go back into hiding now, Axl. Chinese Democracy sucks.

2. Bernard Madoff

Title: Investment Banker, Two-Bit Con Man, Shakespearean Figure Sold Out by His Own Sons

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Find the Nearest Window, Jump

The Facts: When all is said and done, the financial scandal surrounding Bernie Madoff won't be remembered as the costliest or even most brazen of 2008. But his arrest coming so close to the end of the year -- simultaneously bookending and providing an almost mind-boggling crescendo to the economic disaster that began with the subprime mortgage and credit crises and escalated to titanic financial institutions folding and taxpayers being forced to buy up most of Wall Street -- Madoff has become the one instantly recognizable face of unfettered greed in America in 2008. Sure he bilked investors out of billions of dollars -- perpetrating the largest fraud of its kind by a single person ever -- but more than that, he symbolized, maybe better than anything or anyone, the end of hands-off capitalism. The death of a political and economic era. Thanks to government deregulation and a complete lack of oversight, guys like Madoff had been able to run the table with impunity, turning Wall Street and the global market into their own personal sandbox at the expense of the average person looking to carve out his or her slice of the American dream. It's simply staggering when you consider what Madoff got away with; or the fact that AIG's top executives treated themselves to a half-million dollar spa vacation just a few weeks after the government bailed out their company to the tune of 85-billion dollars; or the fact that JP Morgan is still being arrogantly cryptic about what it's doing with the 25-billion that it received in the bail-out; or that the heads of the big three automakers flew private jets to D.C. to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for their flagging companies. I swear, in another time and place, the struggling masses would've carried these people kicking and screaming to the public square and joyously guillotined them.

Mitigating Factor: Like an raging alcoholic who suddenly wakes up one morning to find himself broke and beaten nearly to death in a gutter, it took hitting rock bottom for this country to finally decide that it's fucking had enough.

"By This Time Next Year, He'll Be..." Inmate #2259837

Dishonorable Mention: It's probably a tie between corrupt-as-hell Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens -- now a convicted felon but always in our hearts as the man who lobbied for the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" and who understands the profound differences between the internet and a truck -- and New York Times columnist and neo-con architect Bill Kristol, who best symbolizes the far right's pig-headed tenacity when it comes to being unwilling to admit to its mistakes. Kristol was wrong about everything -- seriously, everything -- and yet continues to walk around with that Cheshire-Cat-on-Valium smirk on his face while espousing a political philosophy which failed in devastating fashion over the last eight years and was soundly rejected by voters in November of 2008.

1. Sarah Palin

Title: Alaskan Governor (Still), Political Nobody (Formerly), Likely Leader of the Republican Party (Currently), Fashion Plate, Punchline

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Oxycodone, Hyrdocodone, Haloperidol, Lithium, All Taken by the Handful; Nitrous Oxide, Prozac

The Facts: Man, oh man. It would be great to be able to throw some sort of Shyamalanian twist in here at the end, but there's just no way to escape the inevitable: Sarah Palin was hands-down the dumbest thing going in 2008. A comedian's wet dream -- and Intelligent America's worst nightmare should her political aspirations have come to fruition -- Palin was so astonishing in her provincial arrogance, so spectacular in her lack of knowledge or shame, and so admittedly awe-inspiring in her commitment to overlooking her own obvious deficiencies while putting absolute faith in both Jesus and the notion that a well-placed wink and a little small-town sweet talk was all she'd need to succeed on the world stage that her campaign instantly became a benchmark in unabashed folly. The new gold standard for idiocy in the 21st century. We could run down the moments that will be etched in our collective memory for years to come (at least one would hope they will; the alternative could be disastrous) but that would take all day. Instead, best we just cut to the chase: Sarah Palin was almost single-handedly responsible for turning the 2008 Presidential Election into a referendum not on left vs. right or rural vs. metropolitan -- but on smart vs. dumb. Her invocation of the supposed moral and political authority of "Joe Six Pack," particularly as opposed to everyone else in the country, and her smug and insulting implied denunciation of those who place a high value on intellect and education trod all-too-familiar ground for the Republicans; it reduced what had been an election season focused, for the most part, on issues to what some in the party hoped would be a fear-based culture war that would once again lead them to victory. But here was the best part: Palin never really saw herself as the small-town hick she pretended to be and hoped to ingratiate herself to. This was proven by the lavish spending spree that transformed her and her family into, literally, the Beverly Hillbillies. The truth is that she always aspired to be a fashion icon, some hyper-hottie in a tight leather blazer and knee-high black boots, someone worthy of a $75,000 shopping trip to Neiman Marcus. Sarah Palin became everything she ever dreamed of being: Sex and the City, right down to the "city" part. Sure, publicly she rebuked and ridiculed those cosmopolitan urbanites in their bustling elitist hubs, but she knew damn well that she couldn't buy Valentino and Louis Vuitton at the Wal-Mart in Wasilla -- and if you don't think that Sarah Heath Palin had always fantasized about wearing Valentino and carrying Louis Vuitton, I've got a bridge to nowhere I want to sell you. She was always a backwater dingbat, but she became a very well put together backwater dingbat -- which likely convinced her that she was no longer a backwater dingbat. If this is true, then it would mean that Palin essentially ascended to the same position as George W. Bush and her GOP benefactors: she only played the part of the rube and was, in fact, secretly talking down to every one of those pick-up-driving Toby Keith fans who showed up to her rallies -- the Dickies-clad folk not lucky enough to have won the Miss Vice Presidential pageant and been scooped up to a life of charter jets and appearances on Saturday Night Live. Sarah Palin was and remains completely full of shit, but we should be willing to concede that perhaps she's dumb as a fox -- which doesn't negate the fact that she's still dumb. Still a triumph of style over substance. And still dangerous.

Mitigating Factor: President Barack Obama, Tina Fey

"By This Time Next Year, She'll Be..." Already on the ticket in at least 23 states. And a great-grandmother.

Dishonorable Mention: Joe the Plumber -- who was neither named Joe nor a plumber. Tell me you don't roll your eyes at the mere mention of this entirely fictional mascot for the McCain campaign. Uh-huh -- I thought so.

Postscript: For those who have expressed curiosity as to why George W. Bush -- or for that matter Hillary Clinton -- wasn't chosen for this list, the answer is simple: The Bushes and Clintons are practically emeritii at this point when it comes to being the worst of the worst. I figured I'd give a few new folks a chance to compete. See you again in January of 2010.

Greg Mitchell: First Anniversary of Bill Kristol at the New York Times : Will He Get Axed Next Week?

2008-12-26T12:06:45Z

Exactly one year ago this weekend, the the Huffington Post's Danny Shea broke the news that, as Jim Morrison might have put it, the Kristol Ship was about to sail at The New York Times. Much uproar ensued across the blogosphere. I recalled Kristol's call for the paper to be prosecuted, on Fox News in 2006, after its big banking records scoop: "I think it is an open question whether the Times itself should be prosecuted for this totally gratuitous revealing of an ongoing secret classified program that is part of the war on terror."

A day after the Huffington Post reported it, the Times announced that it had indeed hired the conservative pundit as a new weekly op-ed columnist, on a one-year contract.

Liberal bloggers really reacted now and Kristol said, in an interview with Politico.com, it gave him some pleasure to see their "heads explode." Kristol, of course, was perhaps the most influential pundit of all in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has strongly defended the move ever since.

Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal backed the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement that he failed to understand "this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill... The idea that the New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual -- and somehow that's a bad thing," Rosenthal added. "How intolerant is that?"

The paper, however, noted in its own announcement: "In a 2003 column on the turmoil within the Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not 'a first-rate newspaper of record,' adding, 'the Times is irredeemable.'"

Fun soon followed when, on January 7, eight paragraphs into his new stint as op-ed columnist, Kristol already made an embarrassing error.

His column, which suggested (with his usual prescience) that the Democrats not underestimate Mike Huckabee's chances to win it all, included a paragraph just past the midway point, in which he quoted the "conservative writer Michelle Malkin" as saying, "For the work-hard-to-get-ahead strivers who represent the heart and soul of the G.O.P., there are obvious, powerful points of identification."

There was just one problem : She never said or wrote it, as she was quick to point out herself on her michellemalkin.com site: "Since I never usually appear on the New York Times op-ed page unless someone's calling me a fascist, I was pleasantly surprised to see the quote. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I didn't write what Kristol attributed to me. A different MM - Michael Medved - was the author."

Several long hours passed before Malkin was changed to Medved in the column at nytimes.com, with a note at the bottom of the column disclosing the original error. But as Jon Stewart is fond of saying, "Bill Kristol, aren't you ever right?"

Six days later, in a message that probably did not going down well in the New York Times' front office, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, said the Times needed to hire a conservative of some stripe but called the hiring of Kristol as an op-ed columnist a "mistake."

He also wrote that of nearly 700 messages he has received about the selection, only one praised the pick. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., he revealed, "was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction."

Hoyt concluded the column: "This is a decision I would not have made. But it is not the end of the world. Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down.... If Kristol is another [William] Safire, he has the chance to prove it. If not, he and the newspaper will move on, and the search will resume." Kristol proceeded to suggest Clarence Thomas for vice president and then promote Sarah Palin. He even accused Stewart of relying too much on information in the...New York Times.

Now, a year later, the Times indeed has a chance to "move on." What do you think will happen?

Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher. His latest book on Iraq and the media is titled "So Wrong for So Long." His book on the 2008 campaign will be published next month.

Bill Kristol Not Even Trying Anymore At New York Times

2008-12-22T15:27:39Z

If you've read this morning's op-ed from Bill Kristol in the New York Times, feel not alone. You are correct: it does, in fact, make no sense at all. Indeed, the piece is a perfect circle of nonsense. And yet, I understand it perfectly. Bill Kristol's contract to write these columns is about up, he probably won't be back, and he's doing his best to play out the string with as little effort as possible. This week is a special triumph for that mission: it's a column in which the columnist basically filibusters himself.

The basic ingredients are two big news stories that lack any meaningful connection, a smattering of insight that a bunch of people already had, and the conjunction, "but." Here's how it goes:

Bill Kristol watched Fox News Sunday, a show he is on.

He recaps a section of the most recent edition of the show he is on.

He restates something asinine he said on said show (Dick Cheney telling Pat Leahy to "go fuck himself" is "a beautiful statement of justice.")

He wanders around for a while.

"Have I praised the "Surge" in the past five minutes? No? Okay! SURGE!" (Twiddles nipples.)

BUT!

Rod Blagojevich! He's been in the news, right?

Adds some funny lines from the wiretaps.

As noted by others, Blago's wife is a foul-mouthed Cubs hater.

Fills more column space by including several lines of Rudyard Kipling.

As noted by others, Blago stopped short of a self-aware line in that poem.

As noted by others, HAIRBRUSH JOKE.

As noted previously, Blago was on wiretaps.

THOUGHTFUL MOMENT: "Hmm. I wonder if Dick Cheney has ever read Kipling?"

EUREKA: "Woo! I tied this all together! Off to copyedit."

Anyway, the New York Times has abused their readership by printing Kristol's effort-free nonsense for a year, and they've benefited from it because every time he's penned something, people everywhere react with outrage or mocking or fact-checking or criticism, and that's precisely why he was hired in the first place -- not for quality insight, but for the clicks that come from hosting a weekly intellectual highway accident. So, out of fairness, I'm including a link to this mess, but I urge you: do not click it. You'll only be giving the Times what it wants. Trust me: Bill Kristol wants you to read this about as badly as he wanted to write it.

Kristol On Cheney: Kipling Would Admire Him

2008-12-22T11:24:54Z

You gotta love Dick Cheney.

O.K., O.K. ... you don't have to. But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday":

WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?

Chris Kelly: The Weekly Standard Embarrasses Me In Front of My Friends

2008-12-12T14:04:45Z

Dear Arianna,

You're so nice, and I feel like we have this good thing going, so this isn't going to be easy, but it has to be said. I told you a lie on Tuesday.

I never meant to hurt you. That was the last thing I wanted. But if you'll just calm down and let me explain.

It wasn't my fault.

It was that asshole Bill Kristol.

Can you... can you... can you just let me talk? Okay.

Remember how I was blogging about that Kid Rock video, the one they show before every movie in America, where Kid carries on about the National Guard kicking ass, and all you can think is, "If we could wring out his hat, we wouldn't need foreign oil?" Well, I said a lot of things, because I was angry... we were both angry, if you recall... and one of them was:

"Which is why they -- we -- hired an Academy Award-winning director, James Mangold, and a brilliant, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer, Wally Pfister."

Well, James Mangold did direct American Warrior, and he'll have to answer for that. But he's never won an Academy Award. He's never even been nominated for an Academy Award. He directed Walk the Line, and Reese Witherspoon won an Academy Award, and that was the beginning of the end for her and Ryan.

That and the fact that she couldn't trust him. The way you can't trust me. If I'm going to go around lying all the time.

I know. I know. This it how it started with you and Newt Gingrich.

Where did I get the fool idea that James Mangold won an Academy Award? I checked the places I looked things up on Tuesday.

-Advertising Age
-USA Today
-A trade magazine called Shoot
-A website for an ad agency called LM&O
-A press release from a marketing company called 2ergo
-Some other press releases
-The National Humanities Alliance
-The National Endowment for the Arts
-Commondreams.org.

-I knew that John Wayne shot parts of Sands of Iwo Jima at Republic in Studio City (now CBS Studio Center), but I looked it up just to be sure.

-The Laurie Anderson quote is from "Sharkey's Day."

And, please forgive me, Arianna, it turns out I used one other source, too...

How to Woo a Warrior

The National Guard, Now Showing at the Multiplex
by Justin Shubow

Now airing in theaters before the coming attractions, "American Warrior" is a stunningly unorthodox commercial for the U.S. National Guard. Directed by Academy Award-winner James Mangold, the two-minute-and-35-second music video combines a kick-ass song by Kid Rock with visuals that cut between the rock star in concert, Dale Earnhardt Jr. braving danger in a stock-car race, and guardsmen deployed at home and abroad...

The Weekly Standard
Volume 014, Issue 08
11/03/2008

What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking. I guess I just assumed even they couldn't be wrong about everything. Especially something so easy to check. At least not in the lede.

I know, the only way to tell when William Kristol is lying is when his horrible lipless skull is clapping up and down, but come on.

I've learned my lesson. You can trust websites and performance artists; you can trust your memory; you can trust ad agencies and press releases, but you can never, ever believe anything in The Weekly Standard.

Nick Kristof: Don't Confuse Me With Bill Kristol

2008-12-09T06:50:47Z

From the Salt Lake Tribune this evening:

Kristof: Think twice about moving to small-government conservatism
Nicholas D. Kristof

Sound familiar? Yup, that was the Kristol column today in the Times. Not the Kristof column, the Kristol column.

There is a difference. The New York Times News Service is calling the Salt Lake Tribune to get this fixed. Here's the link; see if it has changed to Kristol by the time you hit it.

And in the meantime, I'm considering suing for defamation.

George Mitrovich: Of Markets & Morality

2008-12-04T13:39:49Z

William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and New York Times columnist (a reflection of the Times' desire to balance its editorial page, but Bill Safire he is not), wrote recently about the economy for the Times. Apparently he now believes no one knows what's really going on in the world of finance.

Wow! I didn't see that coming.

Forgive me, but some of us have known for a few years what Mr. Kristol belatedly discovered, the economy is in free fall and no one knows when it will end, how it will end, if it will end - a fact more dramatically evident each passing day.

This past summer I read a long article in the Financial Times. It was a profile of the three most important bankers in the world - Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. When I finished it I thought to myself, "They have no clue what's going on."

The grave economic crisis America and the world faces is a great leveler. Neither the most astute economic brains in the world nor your next-door neighbor can fathom what's taking place. There is equality in our confusion.

In my case I didn't go to Harvard or Yale, MIT or Cornell. I didn't study under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago or Paul Krugman at Princeton (both Noble Prize Laureates). I'm just a guy who went to a small Christian liberal arts school (Pasadena College then, but Point Loma Nazarene University now), but apparently the education I received was enough to understand what you understand, that Wall Street swifties and their economics brain teams have led us into a truly dangerous situation; one so dangerous that in time it may trump the Great Depression.

Last week the Bush Administration announced another bailout, this time Citigroup. The Government has now pledged more than $3 trillion to rescue Wall Street and failing banks - with no end in sight. Where does it end? How many more Wall Street firms will collapse? And just this week we're told the United States is a recession, and has been since December of '07. (Will they tell us next December the recession has become a depression?)

In the meanwhile, Sheila Bare, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), has announced that if we can't find a way to stop home foreclosures, there will be more than 5 million people out of their homes by the end of next year - 5 million!

On the day of the Citigroup bailout the New York Times ran a story about a farmer and his family in Platteville, Colorado, who announced they would give away produce left over from the farm's harvest. On the day of the give away 40,000 people showed up. Why? Because people are hurting and hungry and the free produce - more than 600,000 pounds of carrots, leeks, and potatoes - was manna from heaven.

On the day before that in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, 4,000 people waited long hours for free food being distributed.

What's wrong with this picture? Billions for banks and Wall Street and nothing for Main Street, nothing for those Americans who once constituted the Middle Class, never mind the poor. It's a damnable outrage, and at its core is moral rot - the moral rot of Wall Street, the moral rot of the Economic Royalists who told us deregulation was good for America, good for the world. No it wasn't!

The Economic Royalists who fought Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal are still with us (not a few of whom made up Bill Clinton's team of economic advisors, and some of whom now counsel the President-elect). They, both Republicans and Democrats, are Economic Darwinians. They believe in the survival of the fittest - as long as they are counted among the fittest. They, in the name of free and unregulated markets, created mechanisms - do you know anyone who can explain a derivative? - by which they could achieve obscene wealth - as in the $54 billion given out by Wall Street in Christmas 2006 bonuses - without accountability to either investors or government; mechanisms so convoluted as to be beyond the comprehension of even those responsible for their creation.

This rush to deregulation began under President Reagan. It grew significantly under President Clinton, and exponentially under President Bush. But this unrestrained faith in free markets, a faith not even Adam Smith, a moral philosopher, fully embraced (although try and tell that to his conservative acolytes), was a horrendous miscalculation, not alone of markets but even more telling of human nature. But today, amid economic devastation, amid crumbling markets, amid rampant economic uncertainties, those responsible for permitting such greed, greed that threatens the very foundations of our Republic, have slipped away in their Ferraris to mansion number two, maybe mansion number three, or four. They got theirs while the getting was good - and the rest of us be damned.

When we dared to question the beneficiaries of this massive wealth accumulation, those responsible for the greatest mis-allocation of wealth in our history, to challenge their moral values, they responded forcibly by saying we must not engage in "class warfare"; it's a dangerous thing, they warned, for a democracy to pit class against class. They said this even as they all but destroyed the Middle Class; as they ran over it as so much road kill on the their highway to ungodly riches.

In the end, the long-term consequences of unregulated markets and uncontrolled greed may impact our country for a longer period of time than even the devastating attacks of 9/11 - as horrifying and tragic as was that terrible day in our history.

I will end this by making a suggestion: If you truly want to understands what's happened to the economy, don't ask your banker or stockbroker, least of all an economist - ask a theologian.

George Mitrovich is a San Diego civic leader. He can be reached at gmitro35@gmail.com.

Thomas Frank: Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP

2008-12-03T15:40:25Z

Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services.

That these were all disastrous policies made no difference: The goal was to use state power to achieve lasting victory for the ideas of the right.

On the other side of the political fence, strategic moves of this kind are fairly rare. Instead, for most of my lifetime, prominent Democratic leaders have been chucking liberalism itself for the sake of immediate tactical gain.

Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle. His most memorable innovation was "triangulating" between his own party and the right, his most famous speech declared and end to "the era of big government," his most consequential policy move was to cement the consensus on deregulation and free trade, and many of his boldest stands were taken against his own party.

The results were not pretty, either for the Democrats or for the nation.

Still, conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."

In the Clinton years, of course, it was the Republicans who succeeded. And the Democrats' failure -- the failure to deliver national health care that is, not the act of proposing national health care -- was a crucial element, in Mr. Perlstein's view, in the Republican Revolution of 1994. Assessing the accomplishments of the "party of the people" after those first months of Clintonism, middle-class Americans were left with what? A big helping of Nafta. Mmm-mmm.

Fourteen years later, we find ourselves at the same point in the political debate, with a Democratic president-elect promising to deliver some variety of health-care reform. And, like a cuckoo emerging from a clock, Mr. Kristol's old refrain is promptly taken up by a new chorus. "Blocking Obama's Health Plan Is Key to the GOP's Survival," proclaims the headline of a November blog post by Michael F. Cannon, the libertarian Cato Institute's director of Health Policy Studies. His argument, stitched together from other blog posts, is pretty much the same as Mr. Kristol's in 1993. Any kind of national medical program would be so powerfully attractive to working-class voters that it would shift the tectonic plates of the nation's politics. Therefore, such a program must be stopped.

Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses. And my liberal soul is soothed to find that an enormous majority of my fellow citizens agree, in general terms, with my views on this subject.

But it pleases me even more to think that the conservatives' nightmare of permanent defeat might come true simply if Democrats do the right thing. No, health-care reform isn't as strategically diabolical as, say, the K Street Project. It involves only the most straightforward politics: good government stepping in to heal an ancient, festering wound. But if by doing this Barack Obama also happens to nullify decades of conservative propaganda, so much the better for all of us.

Thomas Frank's column, The Tilting Yard, appears every Wednesday at OpinionJournal.com

Also in Opinion Journal:

Ralph Nader and Toby Heaps: We Need a Global Carbon Tax

Review & Outlook: 'No Line Responsibilities'

Rove Defends Bush: He's Not Worst President Of Past 50 Years

2008-12-03T15:06:25Z

George W. Bush is the worst United States president of the last fifty years.

In the liberal bastion of New York City's Upper West Side, this rendering of presidential disrepute is generally considered a ghastly understatement. The last fifty years? one resident asked the Huffington Post. How about our nation's history? Why limit it to the United States?

And yet, with this crowd as a backdrop, the proposition of Bush's terribleness was debated on Tuesday night. Spicing up matters: arguing the defense was none other than the architect of the Bush presidency, former adviser Karl Rove.

It promised to be a provocative if not potentially awkward scene -- Bush's so-called "brain" appearing before a crowd whose members considered him complicit in terrible political, if not criminal, misdeeds. And in this regard the affair -- an Oxford-style debate sponsored by the organization, Intelligence-squared -- didn't disappoint.

Over the course of nearly two hours, Rove and his co-defendant, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, clawed with, argued against and often talked over Slate's Jacob Weisburg and The Guardian's Simon Jenkins -- who took up the motion in the affirmative.

The discussions were substantive, touching on topics ranging from Iraq War and detention policies to immigration reform and Republican politics. And the atmosphere was, as expected, charged, with hisses and hollers following arguments from both sides.

But the draw of course was Rove, who seemed at times to be deeply and emotionally invested in the task of defending the presidency he helped create.

"I'm going to make an appeal to the open-minded people of the Upper West Side," he declared in his opening statement, to the laughter of the crowd of roughly 700 people.

As the other panelists delivered their remarks, Rove wrote furiously in his notebook. He claimed that critics of the president suffered from a "peculiar form of Bush hatred that caused people to lose their rational senses about the man..." and said the political left never gave his former boss his due because they thought the 2000 election "was illegitimate."

When the Jenkins went through a litany of Bush policy failures, Rove termed it a "drive by shooting." When Weisburg challenged the execution of the Iraq War, Rove accused him of delving in fiction and performing an outlandish flip-flop -- as if changing one's mind was some sort of unpardonable offense. And when a questioner asked about his refusal to testify in a "criminal trial," Rove addressed the man directly, said he was unaware of such a trial, and asked him to elucidate what he meant, knowing fully well that it was a reference to the congressional committee that had compelled his testimony.

"I didn't appear before the committee out of a respect for the separation of powers," was the gist of Rove's answer. It is the same one he's given before, only this time it was delivered with a bit more exacerbation, owing perhaps to the countless times he has been asked the question.

Indeed, much of Rove's defense, unlike Kristol's, seemed strained -- not just because he is undoubtedly exhausted from delivering it, but because the weight of history seemed firmly on his mind.

"We were asking the country to do tough things for a long time," he said, when asked to rationalize Bush's low approval ratings. "There have been four president's who have had lower approval ratings: Carter, Nixon, Johnson and Truman... history has judged each man differently after their departure."

It was a convenient answer at best -- leaving out the addendum that a president has never suffered this level of disapproval for such a long period. But, then again, the debate forum was not an exercise in objectivity.

Rove, for example, argued that Barack Obama's win was summarily unimpressive, as he scored just three percentage points more of the popular vote than Bush did in 2004. There was no mentioning of the Electoral College rout enjoyed by the current president-elect.

Kristol, meanwhile, offered proof of Bush's presidential decency by arguing that Obama would not be all that different once in office. "The proof is in the pudding," he said. "Obama is not going to change many of Bush's policies." An obviously narrow reading of the Obama agenda, he failed to note that the Illinois Democrat spent nearly two years campaigning against Bush himself.

Then there were the policy matters. Rove argued that the Bush administration would not have gone to war in Iraq if they had known -- at the time -- that Saddam Hussein lacked weapons of mass destruction, putting aside the reported role Dick Cheney played in cooking the intelligence books to meet that very conclusion.

Later, both he and Kristol argued that U.S. forces had succeeded -- indeed, achieved victory -- in Iraq, only to be reminded by Jenkins that "you can't define success in Iraq when you have two million Iraqi citizens camped outside of Damascus because they are too afraid to return to a country occupied by Americans."

Finally, Rove was pressed to explain how, if the war against terror was a signature Bush success, the United States government had failed to capture Osama Bin Laden during his eight years in office.

"Because he is hiding in a deep dark cave in a very dark corner of what is likely Pakistan," he replied. "Every effort has been made to get him, to get as his communications, his allies and subordinates. And a lot of them are dead. And we haven't heard very much from him either."

There was nothing particularly excruciating about the affair. Indeed, on several occasions Rove received a healthy applause for his answers, such as when he wondered aloud how the other side of the panel could justify Lyndon Johnson's blunders in Vietnam but be sickened by Bush's mishandling of Iraq. On many more occasions, both he and Kristol scored strong debate points -- including a tag-team shout-down of Jenkin's assertion that the Bush administration had targeted Muslims for detention.

"The point is, you didn't need to do it," said Jenkins.

"We didn't do it!" replied Kristol.

Moreover, the liberal pair of debaters suffered their fair share of grilling by members of the audience -- as well as by Kristol and Rove, who, for example, wondered how Bush could be criticized for steering historic amounts of money towards combating AIDS in Africa solely because he wanted it for groups pushing an abstinence-only agenda.

In fact, after the debate was over, on-site polling results showed that more people had been persuaded to believe that Bush was not the worst president of the last fifty years than were persuaded to affirm his horribleness.

And yet, 68 percent of the audience still claimed the motion was true (again, this is the Upper West Side). And the mere fact that the proposition was being debated seemed to gnaw, ever so slightly, at Rove, the creator of this perceived mess. As the event wore on, the debate remained not on Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon's follies, but rather all the nitty-gritty missteps performed by the current White House occupant; until finally, it ended with a quite-personal thud.

"[Bush] couldn't open his mind long enough to consider alternatives or consider the fact that he might have been wrong," Weisberg said in his closing remarks. "America's great nepotistic experiment is finally coming to an end."

With additional reporting from Nicholas Graham.

Rove: We Wouldn't Have Invaded Iraq If We Knew The Truth About WMDs

2008-12-02T22:07:41Z

In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. "Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."

The remarks, delivered at a debate in New York on Bush's legacy, came amidst a vigorous defense by Rove on behalf of the war's purpose and outcome. At no point was it mentioned that the administration -- specifically Vice President Dick Cheney -- reportedly advanced faulty or poorly sourced information to fit the conclusion that Iraq possessed WMD, or that intelligence reports from the run-up to the war suggested that such a case was flimsy. Later in the event, Rove argued that Saddam Hussein was supporting terrorism, poised a grave threat to the region, and had systematically duped the international community into assuming he was armed.

"He told his interrogators it made him look big in the neighborhood," said Rove, before noting all of the Democratic officials who believed as much.

As such, Rove argued, the Bush administration was justified in the course it chose and the world better off for its actions.

And yet, his remarks stand in contrast to those offered by the president himself, both recently and in the past. In an interview that aired last night with ABC's Charlie Gibson, Bush declared that the greatest regret of his presidency was "the intelligence failure in Iraq." But he claimed it was "hard... to speculate" as to whether or not he would make the same decision to invade with the correct information.

Back in December 2005, however, Bush did just that, declaring the WMD issue effectively irrelevant when he said that, "knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision."

"So, if you had had this -- if the weapons had been out of the equation because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?" Fox News' Brit Hume asked.

"Absolutely," replied Bush.

On Tuesday night, Rove wasn't the only Iraq war protagonist indulging in a bit of retrospection. Bill Kristol, of the Weekly Standard and Project for a New American Century fame, said he agreed with the sentiment that "the President would not in fact have gone to war if he had known what seems to be the case, that Saddam did not have functioning weapons programs at the time."

At the same time, Kristol too, argued that the decision to invade was ultimately correct, asserting that with Hussein still in power, radical groups would be more empowered, and radicalism would be resurgent far more than it is today.

Meghan O'Hara: The IFC Media Project: Bill Kristol & Pentagon Propaganda

2008-12-02T16:31:27Z

Two weeks ago during our big media panel discussion with Arianna Huffington, we watched portions of the second episode of The IFC Media Project -- about the war in Iraq.

Afterwards, Bill Kristol pooh-poohed our series because our piece on the Pentagon's propaganda tactics had featured retired General Barry McCaffrey.

Kristol argued that McCaffrey was a poor poster boy for the Pentagon's attempts to control the media's storyline about the war effort because McCaffrey was an independent voice, one not quick to kowtow to the Bush administration.

Our piece on the administration's propaganda efforts dissected the architecture behind both the military analyst program - detailed this past spring by David Barstow in the New York Times and the military's embedded media program.

Each was designed to control the media's view of the war and how the war was reported. By controlling the media, the administration sought to control public perception.

It would be easy to blame the administration for this kind of truth twisting, but that's not what our show is about and, frankly, it's not the government's job to report the news.

In this war effort, the US media has continually and almost unbelievably failed to ferret out our government's true intentions. By the Pentagon's own admission, the embedded media program was established to control US public opinion and ensure support for the war.

And as David Barstow revealed in April, the point of the military analyst program was to use these retired generals as "force multipliers," feeding them talking points and giving them unfettered access so they could relay the "true" face of war to the American people.

Bill Kristol's protestations at that media panel that Barry McCaffrey was somehow an independent voice in this field of propaganda were entertaining at the time, but this past Sunday, David Barstow dropped another bombshell article in the New York Times, this one all about - who else? - Barry McCaffrey.

Barstow wrote:

"His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.

At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.

The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.

Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests."

Either willfully or just ignorantly, our news media has fed us a steady diet of corrupted news, relying on experts they do not vet and information they often cannot substantiate.

The Pentagon's propaganda strategy worked so well only because so many of our news outlets failed to question where they were getting their information, and who was giving it.

Our show's mission is to call out the folks who got it wrong and to commend the journalists who do it right. Bill Kristol could learn a lot from Barstow's excellent article about General McCaffrey. Ideology is no excuse for the Pentagon's bad behavior and it's an even worse excuse for a spirit of journalism that routinely fails to tell the whole story.

But the propaganda show was last week's episode. This week on The IFC Media Project we conduct a scientific experiment to see how screaming pundits affect your brain and we explore the art of distraction in a 24-hour news cycle gone mad.

Kristol's Next War: Send The US Marines After Somali Pirates

2008-11-30T15:35:22Z

In addition to being a booster of the two actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bill Kristol and/or his publication has, at one time or another, also called for the United States to go to war with North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Sudan. And now he's got another war he's like to start:

And while [Bush is] at it, perhaps he could tell various admirals to stop moaning about how difficult it would be to deal with the pirates off the coast of Somalia (isn't keeping the shipping lanes open a core mission of the Navy?) and order the Navy to clobber them. If need be, the Marines would no doubt be glad to recapitulate their origins and join in by going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens.

Kristol Calls On Bush To Pardon Torturers And Wiretappers

2008-11-29T13:19:56Z

In his new Weekly Standard column, right-wing pundit Bill Kristol lays out a to-do list for President Bush before he leaves office. He urges Bush to deliver speeches "reminding Americans of our successes fighting the war on terror." Kristol dreams, "Over time, Bush might even get deserved credit for effective conduct of the war on terror."

After urging Bush to fight the incoming administration's desire to close Guantanamo, Kristol concludes with this:

One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning-and should at least be vociferously praising-everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

Jason Rosenbaum: Expose the Right and we Win Health Care

2008-11-25T15:12:56Z

Health Care for America Now held a retreat last week. Via Greg Sargent at TPM:

I'm told that dozens of the heaviest hitters from the health care reform world met for a private retreat in Virginia last week and spent two days girding for a major battle with the insurance industry, hashing out specific messaging, discussing organizing goals and planning a major fundraising drive to blanket the airwaves with ads next year.

At the retreat -- which was organized by Health Care For America Now, the major umbrella group of unions, reform advocates and providers -- the group agreed that they were aiming to start next year with at least $25 million for ads and field organizing, with the hope of raising many millions more.

Lots of elements of health care reform and how to win were discussed, but one of the most important was taking on the opposition. Specifically, if we want to win health care reform, we have to not only prove the insurance industry and the right-wing of this country wrong, we have to make them untrustworthy.

Case in point, as I wrote yesterday, conservatives and the industry will use all their resources to "kill" health care reform to preserve their own interests:

As this debate moves forward, keep a close eye on who's making arguments. If it's the insurance or pharmaceutical industry, you can bet their argument helps or protects their bottom line. If it's conservatives, you can bet it helps their political viability. Don't ever assume these groups have the public's interest at heart.

Having arguments is one thing, and yes, reasonable people can disagree on issues like health care. But it's important that the general public understand who's pushing arguments like "We can't afford health care in an economic crisis" or "big government health care is not the solution we need" and why they are pushing those arguments. As conservatives are making clear, they aren't against health care for ideological reasons so much as for partisan reasons:

Amidst the usual scary phrases like "government takeover," "Marxist," and "Obamacare" (what does that even mean?), Pethokoukis comes clean about his real problem with health care reform - people will like it and they'll like Obama for making it happen. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute agrees. His message to Republican lawmakers: Blocking Obama's Health Plan Is Key to the GOP's Survival.

The country needs to understand why the right-wing is against health care reform. You can help make that happen.

SEIU has put together an online letter writing tool for folks to write letters to the editor to their local paper. All you have to do is input your zip code and write a letter and it will be automatically submitted to all the local papers in your area.

So, please take a moment and write a letter to your local papers. Expose the reasons why conservatives oppose health care reform. Make their arguments untrustworthy. That way, we'll be able to win quality, affordable health care for all in 2009.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

Meghan O'Hara: The IFC Media Project

2008-11-25T14:27:47Z

Call it masochism. Why else would we invite a roomful of journalists to critique our new show that critiques journalism, just hours before it premiered on IFC? (The IFC Media Project, IFC, 8:00PM, Tuesdays)

But that's exactly what we did last Tuesday at Michael's Restaurant -- New York's "media industry eatery" -- where Arianna Huffington moderated a lunchtime panel to discuss the state of media today.

It was a fascinating scene. There was Gideon Yago, our show's host, on stage with serious journalistic heavyweights: old-schooler Pete Hamill, New York Times conservative columnist Bill Kristol, conservative writer and satirist Christopher Buckley. And there was that roomful of reporters and reviewers, eating their lunches, watching everything with a critical eye.

As the event got underway, I had no idea what to expect from the panel. With so many differently-minded, politically savvy personalities in the mix, I had to ask myself - "What are we getting into here?"

What we got into, if I can put it politely, was a "lively exchange of ideas."

Gideon was talking about our second episode (airs Tuesday 11/25, 8:00PM) which examines how the media has covered the Iraq war and how the Bush administration has used propaganda tactics to control the story.

"You have to search YouTube like you're looking for hardcore pornography to find actual images from the Iraq War," said Gideon, kicking off the discussion.

The panel erupted into an electrifying debate. All of a sudden, Pete Hamill and Bill Kristol were arguing furiously about whether the American People have seen the real war at all.

This kind of questioning of conventional wisdom is exactly what this show is about.
It was a great moment, to see how simply questioning the media's role in selling this war can turn an ordinary discussion into a meaty argument about the role of the media itself. It was riveting.

But don't take my word for it - you can check out the full panel discussion here:

Amazingly, before the panel was even over, word of the exchange had spread. Media folks in the audience were twittering the whole thing and there were nearly instantaneous reports of the panel's entire discussion posted online by the time I got back to my office. Even the Huffington Post reported on some of the action, and also links to other online stories:

The best part about it all is that they were discussing the very real issues addressed in the show, not the show itself. Our lofty goal was achieved with rapid-fire success.

That kind of immediacy, this power of the Internet to make all things that happen instantly known, is of course part of what is killing the newspaper and a large part of what is revolutionizing the world we live in.

"If mainstream media is suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), then online media is suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)" - Arianna Huffington

It's a theme we'll explore in detail in our sixth episode, but it was certainly bizarre to experience first hand.

This week, we're digging into the coverage of the war in Iraq. One segment gives the first hand account of Benjamin Lowy , a photojournalist on the ground in Iraq.

And my favorite piece (the one that caused such a furor at the panel) delves into the genesis of the Pentagon's embedded media program and their use of "force multipliers" - the TV military analysts -- to push the administration's message on the American people. It's called "propaganda" -- even the Pentagon says so! Be sure to check it out.

The goal of The IFC Media Project is to delve into the media, to look at the forces and interests that shape our news, at how it is gathered and how it is packaged.

We can better understand where we are now by looking at the past, and we can better shape the future if we not only question the powers that shape our world, but demand better from them.

The point of the show is not the show itself, but the issues within it. If The IFC Media Project can raise important questions like, does the pro-Israel lobby influence news coverage? or does the Pentagon use the news media to achieve its own agenda? and get people really talking about the issues, then we have accomplished what we set out to do.