By all accounts Russert was a nice guy who apparently never had a bad word to say about anyone.

I'm sure he was also a loving family man and his death must still be as painful to them today as it was a year ago.

But, these are the qualities we seek in a father and a husband, not a journalist whose job it is to extract the truth from politicians talking out of the side of their mouths.

He failed miserably at that over and over again. Russ didn't want to offend those politicians at any cost, so that cost, shared by Russert and many others, was the death of thousands of young, dedicated young men.

I knew the Iraqi war was a sham from the beginning and I am a lowly salesman without a college degree.

How much more of an education did Russ and the rest of the MSM have than I, and why was it more important to them not to not ruffle feathers so this war could happen at an obscene cost of dead young Republicans and Democrats.

Russ sat there week after week reading the talking points that his guests spit out on some other show, or in some other interview, as if it were some secret wiretap that only he had access to, but now he was about to burn them with their own words.

Either Russ wasn't real smart, or he didn't watch his own show that often. Because as his guests were re-wording their old answers, he ceased in conducting an interview, he was now giving them another forum, once again, to lie about the war.

Meet the Press is a tradition and dare I say, it continues unabatedly with David Gregory as the host.

If you have watched Gregory, you certainly have not seen the reporter that appears at the 3:33 mark of the YouTube clip below, as he takes Scott McClellan down a dark lonely alley without Jeff Gannon to save him.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R-0wOc6a_g&feature=related

 

Now, if Gregory dares to challenge anyone, he loses that all-important access. So, we will continue to get bullshit answers like, "I have a wide stance," "She was not an undercover agent."

Somehow, the torture, the lies, and the disgrace that is Dick Cheney didn't create the rage in me it probably deserved.

That seething anger was reserved for the video of that smarmy, cold-hearted, pseudo-Christian President Bush, looking under his desk at the White House Correspondents Dinner, joking about those missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"They must be here somewhere," he giggled, along with a few hundred spineless, White House lapdogs as "The Decider" looked behind curtains and under his desk.

I always wondered how that tape would go over if I took it over to the Pryor home in Moorestown, N.J.

Mr. Bush might not consider a mortar a WMD, but Major John P. Pryor of Moorestown, N.J. died on Christmas Day at age 42, when a mortar hit his living quarters near Mosul. To Major Pryor's family, it was indeed a weapon of mass destruction.

But, don't worry, Mr. Bush, we aren't going to have any "Truth Commission" look at what you did to make sure you and your friends followed the law.

You were just nice guys, doing what you were told, you and Tim.

 

Obama and Congress obviously have no inclinations toward putting the Bush Administration under anything more than a cursory examination of their behavior throughout eight years of destroying the Constitution.

Howard Fineman, speaking on MSNBC, quoted Josh Marshall as a source in announcing that Rahm Emmanuel was offered, and accepted, the job as Chief of Staff in President-Elect Obama's Adminstration.

In comments that are sure to be repeated by the Obama campaign, Gen. David Petraeus said Wednesday that negotiations with the Taliban could be the key to success in Afghanistan."I do think you have to talk to enemies, " Petraeus said when asked about dialogue with the Taliban.Earlier in the week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates took a similar stance saying, "Part of the solution is reconciliation with people who are willing to work with the Afghan government going forward."Look for John McCain to suspend his campaign and rush to Kabul as he criticizes Obama for failing to talk to our enemies.http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/08/terror/main4511185.shtml

I instantly thought of you, Mrs. Edwards, when rumors of an affair involving your husband, John, first surfaced.

It is still you and your family that drive me to ask you to use your considerable strength and character to convince your husband to try again.

While a candidate for the highest office in the land, John Edwards showed not only personal recklessness beyond description, as well as an astounding lack of understanding about the media he courted every day.

While you protested in your DailyKos diary that you and your family be allowed to start the healing process, your husband was preparing a “Nightline” interview that addressed few of the still unanswered questions.

For a man who was having an intimate affair with a woman for at least a year, he had no idea how she afforded a multi-million dollar home, why his closest associates regularly sent her checks of $15,000, but is without any doubt that he is not the father of her child, unchallenged by the convenient lack of testing.

The American people have just as little interest in John’s actual affair as they did with President Clinton’s.

There remains, however, an intense interest in how a man who would cheat on his wife in the midst of a Presidential campaign, be so naïve to think the press would not find out, and if it did, accept his description of trash journalism as the last word.

His promises of help for the poor, a new way for the underprivileged, and his seemingly heroic support in what seemed like to many of us, your darkest hour, all seem cheapened by his need to feed his ego.

There will be more to tell, and I fear, much more pain for you and your children, until John Edwards stands up and tells the full truth that he feels he does not owe his supporters that believed in him without reservation.

We have all seen this same tragic play too frequently in the recent past to not know the ending.

Please ask your husband a question for us all, many of us who supported and believed in him.

Ask him if he could be 99% Elizabeth Edwards for a day, and answer the questions again.

One thing that stuck out today at President Bush's new conference, besides him blaming congress for everything, was a certain reporter.
In much the same vein as the infamous Mr. Guckert, he asked Bush a question pointing out how the FISA bills were not passing and then asked, "Will you ever be able to work with this congress?"
Can anybody shed some light on this new member of the "Pack."

At last night's GOP debate, Rudy Giuliani was well prepared to beat down Mitt Romney on the question of immigration, but was not prepared for the spotlight it would shine on his own hiring practices.

Romney apparently had a contractor do some work on his home and the contractor had some illegal aliens on the job.

When Giuliani tried to paint Romney as a poor executive, or soft on immigration, since he did not bother to check the status of all of the workers on his home, he opened up the Kerik can of worms.

If Romney is a terrible manager for not checking the background of a guy with a paint brush in his hand, what should we label Rudy, who recommended Bernie Kerik for the safety of our entire nation?

I previously had posted on the fact that, unlike the Vietnam War, there are no organized demonstrations against the Iraqi War and what it has done to our country. (anybody remember $2.00 gas?)

We are impotent bloggers, who neither affect real policy change or allow our numbers to be counted, except every few years when there is an election.

You can easily see the amount of damage (S-Chip, FISA etc) that can happen before we vote the offending party out of office.

I think it is a time for real, non-violent, action to remind the Bush administration that we will begin a civil disobedience campaign the day he drops a bomb in Iran.

Sure, that's a day late but it will be a strong enough rallying point, for both real Republicans and Democrats to take action.

I want to emphasize that this is a non-violent protest.

I have even thought the first protest would be a sit-down in front of the Washington Post's columnist's parking lot at closing time.

Clownish? Maybe, but we will move upward and onward and make our feelings known.

The American people, by a huge percentage, do not want another war.

Let's send the message to Bush now.

I will send free "I Will Rise Up" buttons to anyone who wishes to wear them to start the conversation in their workplace.

Send requests to: iwillriseup@hushmail.com

If you saw Rove on any of his TV interviews this week, one thing was unmistakable.

Bush not only took talking points from Rove, he actually did it verbatim.

Watch how Rove always answers a tough question by saying, "Did the war go as we planned, no. Are we making progress, yes."

You can find an example of this type of nonsense in every Bush press conference.

"Did we elect Bush, yes. Did we get the worst President in history, no doubt."

We are now engaged a war that was entered into based on lies, and carrying on long past its stated goal, yet where are the protests from our high-school and college students?

But I, like so many others my age, did not understand why we were fighting for a place called Vietnam, and more to the point, did want to be drafted and come back a drug addict, or mentally ill, like so many of my brother’s friends did.

I will admit I protested the war because I was afraid, with the draft, I would be next.

When I was in my teens, I watched with admiration the re-telling of the heroics of World War II vet, either in movies or from my father, who was a veteran of WWII and the Korean Wars.

I just sat through half of an MTV special called “The Drug Years, “ which had to be produced by a handful of twenty-somethings who never really experienced the times they were so gleefully glorifying.

While I certainly enjoyed my time in those years, I have to admit that ten years after graduating school, I remember mentioning to my older brother that more of my classmates had died from either drugs or alcohol than his eight year old counterparts.

While that may not be, in any way, a scientific sampling of anything, the ever-present war protests in the film were. We don’t have students organizing protests anything like what happened in the sixties.

On the left, we have students and bloggers crying out against the policies of Bush/Cheney, but doing little more than writing about it. Only a very small segment of musicians even mention the war in song, lest they offend their corporate masters.

On the right, we have the mellow-yellow Young Republicans. The “Jonah Goldberg Brigade," who like many of their parents who supported the Vietnam War, just cannot find the time to put that “good-life” on hold long enough to serve.

Does the all-volunteer army give our kids an reason not to be involved, and the warmongers refuge, as demonstrated by Mitt Romney’s recent explanation of his five sons lack of service as “they have chosen not to serve?"

If everyone had to serve two-years of National Service, would we have less people cheerleading for a war they’ll never fight, and more people fighting against a war we never needed?

The death of the so-called mainstream media can now be marked in time with Wolf Blitzer’s feeble, mealy-mouthed declaration of support for Vice President Cheney’s daughters.

“Believe me, we like your daughters,“ will go down in CNN history as it’s “jump the shark” moment, when instead of pushing back at Cheney’s dismissal of a question as “you’re out of line,” Blitzer melted into a puddle of appeasement, with the absolute fear in his eyes being the un-invited passenger on his trip to irrelevance.

As the networks scramble to understand why the Internet, and bloggers specifically, have been eroding their viewer base steadily for the past few years, having a major news anchor abandon his line of questioning in mid-stream because Cheney found it “out of line, “ stands out as a shining example of what is wrong with the current state of journalism.

While the conventional wisdom is that the voters of the recent elections sent a crystal clear message that this administration has worn out its welcome, and its policies are not in step with the majority of the citizens, what message did it say about the people charged with bringing us the news?

As voters ousted the political cheerleaders of this war by an almost universal rejection of the Republican party, why doesn’t the media see any implied responsibility for those enabling the delivery of misinformation on behalf of the Bush-Rove machine?

Instead of challenging every assertion of “the decider,” the networks continue to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, even in the “double-down” escalation incorrectly labeled “the surge.”

While we have several bloggers providing full-time, play-by play of the Libby trial, the major networks have little in the way of in-depth coverage of what could be a defining moment of the Bush presidency.

The same media outlets reporting that two-thirds of Americans have given up on Iraq and this President, don’t seem to realize that those same Americans want every policy by those who brought us this war challenged on every detail.

Instead, we get the breaking news of Wolf Blitzer's creepy affection for the Cheney girls.

If there are any real reporters left would you please grant my one wish for '06 and ask the President the following question?

Mr. President, The CIA and the NSA are two agencies in the forefront of the Global War on Terror.  Your adminstration has announced a full investigation into the leaking of the NSA's wiretapping program.

Why didn't you begin an investigation into the leaking of the identity of someone involved in the war on terror, CIA employee Valerie Plame, who was working on weapons proliferation?

Bloggers are on the cutting edge of a new information distribution machine that demands unique standards on the most efficient way to move their message from the Internet through the MSM and to the end consumer.

In many ways, blogs have overlooked the power they provide their opponents by linking to the extremist wingnuts like O’Reilly, Malkin and their ilk.

This is a medium that thrives on hits and links, which provide revenue, and a wider read, to those, who in some cases, create the most controversy.

It’s about time, the left starts to use the power of the keystroke, and cease linking to the far-right message of hate and discrimination.

Of course, should this happen, the right would retaliate in kind. I could not think of a clearer victory for the left.

While the left could continue exposing the Bush administration and the religious fanatics for what they are by citing the numerous examples of fanaticism and corruption in print and television, the right wing bloggers existence largely depends on mocking the blogs who expose the dark side of the Republican party by being their apologists.

In a sense, what if Jonah Goldberg makes another vapid observation and no one notices?

The networks certainly won’t quote him, he may appear on a Murdoch outlet somewhere, but his dubious relevance, along with others like him, are reduced to creating a diary to themselves.

James Wolcott would be exempt from this new order. I don’t think I could live without his literary stiletto surgically cutting the rungs out from under those who dare ascend the ladder to their high horse.

I am not talking about eliminating dissent; I am suggesting we cut the heart out of the wingnuts obvious extreme message.

No more Dobsons, Robertsons or Coulters.

"What a wonderful world it would be."

 

When the dust settles and the Republicans have been swept out of office after all the convictions and resignations have been served up and metered out, the Democrats should extract their ounce of flesh.

They will certainly have enough votes to begin the process, and most likely, there will be those who will not be interested in the revenge factor.  Those people can ask themselves, which is worse, lying about an extra-marital affair, or lying the country into a deadly war?