Keith Olbermann on the intellectual dishonesty behind the absurd attacks on John Kerry…

[via Raw Story]

How ironic that the key word preventing the completely fake John Kerry story from dominating the news cycle is “us.”

Had Kerry included “us” in his comment, none of this absurdity would have come to pass.

Had he not omitted that word, he’d have said “”You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well, and if you don’t, you get us stuck in Iraq.”

The joke on Bush would’ve been clear.

But, that single dropping of “us” allowed the Right Wing Noise Machine and the complicit Freak Show press to go into overdrive.

When I was very briefly (a week and a half, maybe) the Grand Leader of All Things Internet Strategy for Zephyr Teachout’s bid for the Vermont seat in Congress — since this potential run was in the news, I hope she doesn’t mind me talking about it — I advocated for using “for U.S. House” instead of “for Congress” as her tagline.

I liked the “U.S. = us” reference — as opposed to the somewhat randy “congress.”

And, of course, Bernie Sanders’ campaign has since made a nice use of the “for US” underlined in “for US Senate” in his campaign materials.

But, Kerry, by accident, skipped the “us” in his attempt at mocking Bush and all hell broke loose.

How absurd. And how sad. Because, all of “us” are in this together.

Except those who shamelessly bend the truth for political gain… And those, in the press, who enable them to do so.

So, I wonder why Air America was having trouble getting enough advertising to prevent it from having to declare bankruptcy?

Maybe this has something to do with it?

An internal ABC Radio Networks memo obtained by Media Matters for America, originally from a listener to The Peter B. Collins Show, indicates that nearly 100 ABC advertisers insist that their commercials be blacked out on Air America Radio affiliates. According to the memo, the adverstisers insist that “NONE of their commercials air during AIR AMERICA programming.” Among the advertisers listed are Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, Federal Express, General Electric, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the U.S. Navy.

Here is ABC’s response. In essence… Yeah, so what?

Kid Oakland on MyDD writes a great summary of what is becoming of the maturing netroots movement in a diary entitled “Blogging 2.0.”

It’s one week out and there’s two things that are clear about the progressive blogosphere:

First, the 2005/2006 period represented a test run for any number of projects and concepts that we will be seeing a great deal more of in the years to come.

The Bloggers’ Convention (Yearlykos), campaigns like Use it or Lose It, ACTBlue pages, the rise of Local Blogging, Netroots participation in cultivating and supporting progressive Primary candidates, citizen-created political Media and Video (YouTube), Wide-field targeting a la the 50 State strategy, and online cooperative online projects like we’ve seen here on MyDD and elsewhere…to name just a few.

Second, looking at all these trends and efforts, it becomes more and more clear that many of these projects will not go dormant after the election.

Far from it.

I would argue that we are now engaged in a two year battle for governance in the United States, of which the 2006 mid-terms are just the opening bell, and in which, the netroots will play an increasingly important role on the national and local levels.

As exciting as this election is, it is just the trial run for the emerging progressive netroots movement. We are entering the era of Blogging 2.0.

At least USA Today shows at least partial understanding (sort of) that the netroots movement is not just about some hard left litmus test as the mainstream press usually likes to define it…

Putting aside their own preferences, the Internet activists are promoting and raising money for moderates in swing districts across the country. Many of the candidates have military, business or law enforcement backgrounds. Some, such as Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb and House hopeful Eric Massa of New York, are former Republicans.

As of Tuesday, online activists had contributed some $826,000 to Webb, a former Navy secretary, via ActBlue.com, a clearinghouse that has raised $16 million for scores of Democrats. Massa had $377,000.

“There is not a single issue that takes precedent to the Democrats winning back a majority in the U.S. Senate this year,” Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD.com, wrote last week.

Total Information Awareness has morphed into Tangram…

The public found it so abhorrent, and objected so forcefully, that Congress killed funding for the program in September 2003.

None of us thought that meant the end of TIA, only that it would turn into a classified program and be renamed. Well, the program is now called Tangram, and it is classified:

The government’s top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.

It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create “suspicion scores” for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals’ private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.

Glenn Greenwald explores the depth to which Mark Halperin is willing to sink…

Apparently, the most traumatizing and horrifying thing that could ever happen to Mark Halperin is for Bush followers like Hugh Hewitt to think he’s a liberal. It is self-evidently very important to Halperin — on an emotional and deeply personal level — to demonstrate that he is one of them, or at least not one of those liberals. To achieve this, he made an extraordinary vow to Sean Hannity when trying to win Hannity’s approval, in which he pledged that the media would spend the next two weeks compensating for all of their anti-conservative sins over the past decades, and now he is engaged in a truly debased and highly emotional crusade to obtain Hugh Hewitt’s affection.

I really question whether someone who has obviously made it such a high priority to obtain a very personal form of right-wing absolution can possibly exercise appropriate news judgment. If Halperin is willing to expend this much time and energy and shower Hewitt with such gushing praise — and if he’s willing to make such a public spectacle of himself when doing so — all in order to convince Hewitt that he isn’t liberal, won’t that goal rather obviously affect Halperin’s news coverage? Isn’t there something extremely unseemly about the political director of ABC News engaging in such an intense campaign to win the approval of one of the most blindly partisan, extremist Bush followers in the country?

Mark Halperin is really showing his true colors here, and it is extremely unpleasant to watch. Part of me really hopes — just for the sake of Halperin’s dignity — that he sends no more pleas to Hewitt and that he stops seeking benedictions from the likes of Sean Hannity. But ultimately, it’s necessary to put one’s personal concern for Halperin to the side because this exercise is truly revealing. The need of journalists to please right-wing extremists and convince them that they are good and fair is very pervasive among the national media, and Halperin’s highly emotional interaction with Hewitt is placing a high-powered microscope on how that dynamic works. As ugly as it is, it is highly instructive.

Oh, yeah and that John Kerry thing. I can’t possibly believe it, except that I can. And, of course Mark Halperin’s the Note is again a willing participant in the Freak Show.

They spend almost an entire page, mostly bashing Kerry with a consistent string of typical media perpetuated Republican Party talking points.

Here’s how it starts, under the heading “The elements of Democrats achieving their best case” [for the election]:

Getting Senator John “October Unsurprise” Kerry to apologize and then go to Sun Valley until Nov. 8, 20XX (Insert year of your choice here.)

And then the litany of silliness on page 2 begins with this…

2006: Bush vs. Kerry part II: Siding with Bush:
On TIME Magazine’s Web site, Karen Tumulty demonstrates her keen understanding of all things Kerry. LINK

“You’ve got to wonder about John Kerry’s eye-hand coordination. His career is falling into a pattern. Whenever Kerry is confronted with a big decision, he tries to compensate for his last mistake,” writes Tumulty.

More: “Kerry has managed on the eve of what could be a watershed election to remind pretty much everyone what it was they didn’t like about the Democrats, and especially what they didn’t like about him. It might have made more sense just to say he was sorry — for once to get ahead of a mistake, instead of trying to compensate for it the next time.”

The Boston Herald’s David Wedge writes, “Sen. John Kerry is scrambling to recover from a ‘botched joke’. . . that threatens to sink Democrats in Tuesday’s election and dash his own presidential hopes.” LINK

The New York Post ed board Notes that not one Democratic leader has yet expressed disapproval of Kerry’s remarks and asks “any wonder Democrats aren’t taken seriously on national security?” LINK

I’m sure MediaMatters will continue to document the atrocities.

But, in all fairness, don’t you remember the outrage when Bush said “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we?”

No? Neither do I. Oy vey zmir.