SOURCE: AP/Gail Burton

Feminist author Betty Friedan, left, is seen with former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the Feminist Expo 2000 in Baltimore.

The Center for American Progress is hosting a forum today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The forum participants include CAP President Neera Tanden, current New York Times pundit Gail Collins, former New York Times pundit Anna Quindlen, and CAP Senior Fellow Judith Warner. As the event description notes, when The Feminine Mystique was originally published in 1963, “[m]arried women in some states couldn’t sit on juries, get a job without their husband’s permission, or keep control of their property and earnings.”

One telling historical note from the same year that has always impressed me—and my students when I recount it—involved the marriage of Katharine Meyer to the journalist Philip Graham. Meyer’s father, Eugene, owned The Washington Post Company, where his daughter and his new son-in-law both worked. On the occasion of their marriage, Eugene Meyer simply handed over ownership of the family’s flagship newspaper to Mr. Graham. Mrs. Graham noted in her autobiography, titled Personal History, that, “Far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper.”

As it happened, Mr. Graham suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, and before committing suicide, he sought to divorce his wife for a much younger woman with whom he had conducted a quite open affair around Washington. Had the divorce gone through, Mrs. Graham would likely have lost not only her family’s newspaper but also her livelihood, to say nothing of the incredible career she eventually forged after becoming publisher of the Post and president of its parent company in 1963 upon Mr. Graham’s suicide—all because her father did not think a man should have to work for his wife. Suffice it to say that after the publication of The Feminine Mystique that year, fewer and fewer people—both men and women—were thinking that way anymore.

Few works in all of American history have enjoyed a greater impact, whether measured in political, cultural, or psychological terms, than Friedan’s combination historical novel, manifesto, and cri de coeur. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921, she was raised by immigrant Jewish parents. From an early age, she drifted toward journalism, starting a literary magazine that was too controversial and thus went unpublished in her high school. She then set out for Smith College—the famed New England women’s school—in 1939, where she took a class with the wife of future Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Il), Dorothy Wolff Douglas, who opened her mind to the problem of female oppression. Goldstein planned to continue her studies at the University of California, where she had won a fellowship, but she felt compelled to turn it down when her success made her then-boyfriend nervous.

As a one-time supporter of former Vice President Henry Wallace, Goldstein gravitated toward Marxism and landed a job as a left-wing labor journalist. But after getting married and becoming “Betty Friedan,” she quit her job and attempted to settle down into a life of peaceful suburban domesticity. Deeply unhappy, she got back in touch with a number of her college classmates from Smith and discovered she was not alone in her feelings of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. So Friedan set out to name the disease ailing her and her friends. The result was The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. It was a “spirited intervention in a particular time and place,” as the prominent historian of feminism Christine Stansell aptly noted—it was “a flag planted by an outrider on a battlefield where armies were starting to assemble.”

Friedan’s book was originally published during a four-month newspaper strike in New York City and, as a result, made its way into the world without much advertising or book reviews. The editors of both McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal were fortunately willing to step away from their usual domestic fare and offer excerpts of the book to their combined readership of 36 million. The book’s publisher, W.W. Norton, arranged for a book tour—which was unheard of then for an unknown author—and soon enough, the first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan immediately began receiving letters that read, “I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose,” and “Like light bulbs going off again and again,” and “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!” And a movement was born.

The book began with Friedan attempting to describe her “sense of dissatisfaction” that sprung from a question asked by a housewife: “Is this all?” The “problem that has no name,” as her first chapter was entitled, centered around this vague sense of unhappiness that Friedan had discovered in interviewing numerous women from Smith and elsewhere. “I just don’t feel alive,” one woman told her. Friedan noted the pressure on women to return to domesticity after World War II, believing it was exerted through magazines and popular culture. She made clear that the problem went beyond material concerns into a terrain of life that was more psychic and spiritual. “Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings,” she wrote, drawing upon the teachings of the psychologist Erik Erikson, whose classes she took at the University of California

This sensible argument, though, turned sour toward the end of the book, where she rather crazily compared the life of a postwar suburban American housewife to that of an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. She insisted that, “The women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.” Even so, she struck a chord with millions of women when she called on women to find “creative work of [their] own” outside the home, proposing a kind of female G.I. bill that would let women go back to college and get a degree so they could find work. Quoting the president of Mills College, Friedan said women “should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”

Although Friedan’s book suggested to some that she was calling for a revolutionary form of politics—by citing problems that were not material but more diffuse and spiritual and by invoking the legacy of the Holocaust—her actual politics were quite conventional. She was just a liberal who wanted to extend the rights that women enjoyed, just as liberal civil rights leaders wished to do for African Americans and later for LGBT individuals.

As the feminist historian Ruth Rosen notes, Friedan sturdily resisted pressure to link feminism with issues of sexual freedom, particularly free love or separatist lesbianism. She tried to steer the National Organization for Women—the organization she helped establish—in a middle-class, respectable, reform direction, making it simply a logical extension of liberalism. And in this respect, she succeeded magnificently by achieving a degree of success in her challenges of the comfortable thought and life patterns of an entire country that few authors had achieved since Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776.

A half-century later, we remain in her debt.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, from which the information about Friedan above is drawn and is being released in paperback this week.

SOURCE: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

An email from then-CIA Director David Petraeus is among the 99 pages of emails regarding Benghazi released by the White House on Wednesday, May 15, 2013.

In a new poll from Public Policy Polling, 74 percent of Republicans polled said they think the actions of the Obama administration during the crisis in Benghazi were worse than Watergate. The results, however, might be taken with a grain of salt as half of that 74 percent appear to have no idea whatsoever where—or even what—Benghazi is. According to the poll, “10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.”

While those folks review their old high school geography textbooks, they might also wish to reserve a little time to answer the question: What was Watergate?

One possible answer—an apartment/hotel complex in Washington, D.C., not far from the Kennedy Center—will not help much. Neither will an almost equally concise—but narrowly true—answer: the break-in that occurred at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972 at Democratic headquarters by a bunch of crooks hired by Richard Nixon’s cronies. Perhaps, given one of those definitions, the events related to Benghazi will turn out to be worse, though this remains an open question at best. But if we take the word “Watergate” to mean what nearly everyone has understood it to mean for the past four decades—the series of crimes discovered as a result of said break-in at the complex—then it becomes rather difficult to justify even mentioning the two in the same sentence.

One can find thousands of books on the topic—and tens of thousands of scholarly articles. But on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in last year, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—The Washington Post reporters who originally broke the story—outlined the main elements of the multiple scandals and crimes that led to President Nixon’s forced resignation. Space precludes a full recounting of their article, “40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought,” but among the lowlights were:

• President Nixon personally approved a plan that authorized the CIA, FBI, and military-intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” It also allowed the interception of mail, and unauthorized break-ins by government agents of the homes of law-abiding citizens.
• The Nixon “Plumbers” unit was also unleashed against perceived adversaries of the administration in an ultimately criminal fashion. Among its actions was the break-in into the headquarters of former RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon instructed top aide Bob Haldeman. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?” In addition, in 1969, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor—and later secretary of state—demanded that the FBI spy on 17 journalists and White House aides without court approval.
• President Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell approved a $250,000 criminal plan offered by G. Gordon Liddy to spy on and sabotage Democratic candidates during the 1972 election using wiretaps and burglaries, with “at least 50 operatives … involved in the espionage and sabotage.” The chauffeur of then-leading Democratic presidential contender, Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, received $1,000 a month to spy on the candidate and to steal campaign documents for President Nixon’s campaign staff. In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, While House aide—and later conservative commentator—Pat Buchanan explained, “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.” President Nixon also instructed his aides to order the IRS to investigate the tax returns of all potential Democratic presidential candidates.
• President Nixon approved and directed a criminal conspiracy to try to hide his own role and that of his aides in all of the above. Six days after the Watergate break-in, Haldeman informed the president that Mitchell had suggested that the CIA be used to demand that any investigations be stopped lest they threaten “national security.” President Nixon approved it and instructed Haldeman to tell then-CIA Director Richard Helms to “Play it tough.” The president also instructed his aides to buy the silence of the criminals working for him. “They have to be paid,” he said. “That’s all there is to that.”

It’s been 40 years since Watergate, and members of the insider media are apparently allergic to all forms of historical knowledge, especially when it means putting contemporary “scandals” in the context of those in the past. What’s more, President Nixon’s partisans have been conducting a never-ending war in an attempt to minimize his crimes and those of his aides since the day of the original break-in. Among the most entertaining of these, if perhaps the most obvious, was former Nixon speechwriter and later powerful New York Times pundit William Safire’s efforts to attach a “gate” suffix to every minor morsel of malfeasance to occur in subsequent administrations beginning with “Koreagate,” “Lancegate,” “Billygate,” “Oilgate,” and perhaps least tastefully, “Waterquiddick.”

With the release of the Benghazi emails on Wednesday, it is clear that whatever the problems may have been regarding the administration’s response before or after the attack on the embassy, the notion that any of it could have been “worse than Watergate” is, to put it politely, difficult to countenance. And yet, judging by recent poll results, and stoked by malevolent media hysteria, we are likely to endure this comparison in the coming months, or even years.

Were Safire alive today, he might be tempted to declare victory.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Luca Bruno

Harvard history professor and author Niall Ferguson is apologizing for saying economist John Maynard Keynes didn't care about the future because he was gay and had no children.

When renowned Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson attacked John Maynard Keynes, claiming the iconic, long-dead economist did not care about future generations because he was gay, effete, and childless, the remarks made headlines and triggered outrage.

During the question-and-answer period of a May 2 speech before a group of investors and financial advisors at the 10th Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, California, Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. According to Financial Advisor reporter Tom Kostigen, Ferguson “explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated.” Ferguson then added, according to another reporter, that because “our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today.”

Ferguson’s point—as ludicrous as it is ugly—is that childless homosexuals, especially those married to ballerinas, are indifferent to the fate of future generations. It is Ferguson’s contention that because of his sexuality, Keynes purposely put forth what the right-wing Harvard historian considers to be flawed economic ideas.

A predictable brouhaha resulted, and Ferguson quickly offered his apologies for statements that he deemed to be as “stupid as they were insensitive” and insisted that his “disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation.”

The matter hardly ended there, however. This was not exactly new territory for Ferguson. The economist Justin Wolfers noted that in Ferguson’s extremely well-received 1999 book The Pity of War, Ferguson hypothesizes that what bothered Keynes about World War I, at least in part, was the fact that “the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up.” Ferguson also implied that Keynes could have been influenced to become a harsh critic of the Treaty of Versailles because of his attraction to the German negotiator Carl Melchior.

Journalist Jeet Heer added further context in The American Prospect, citing both Berkeley economist Brad DeLong and the Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geier. Heer said that as stupid as it may be, “the attempt to dismiss Keynes as someone heedless about the future because he was a childless gay man has been a staple of conservative thought for nearly seven decades.” You can find it in the work of Joseph Schumpeter, who observed in a 1946 obituary that Keynes “was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.”

Heer notes that this view is also present in the writings of such noted right-wingers as George Will, Greg Mankiw, Mark Steyn, V.S. Naipaul, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, who as it happens, was married to neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol and is the mother of Republican strategist William Kristol. Heer points out that Himmelfarb insists that Keynes’s famous aphorism—In the long run we are all dead—has “an obvious connection with his homosexuality.” But as Heer points out, neither she, nor Ferguson, nor any of those noted above bothered to address the fact Keynes and his ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova, very much wanted to have children but were fated to fail in this respect owing to her miscarriage.

Yet another reason to doubt the sincerity of Ferguson’s apology is his past tendency to draw connections between views of which he disapproves and personality traits that he finds disagreeable. He has been known, for instance, to equate “people [who] today buy the theory of man-made climate change” with those who embraced alleged scientific evidence supporting racist beliefs.

But perhaps the best reason to doubt the sincerity of Ferguson’s retraction, however, is his complete lack of any compelling explanation of why he would wish to say such a thing in the first place. He was not drunk or high or on pain medication or even careless in his wording. None of the reasons that can sometimes lead us to say the opposite of what we mean—save perhaps mere sniveling hypocrisy and dishonesty—can be said to apply in this case. In a casually brilliant blog post in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman writes:

Ferguson, to his credit, didn’t equivocate. He didn’t claim he “misspoke”. He did what we’re always demanding that misbehaving celebrities do: he just said sorry. Except, now that he’s done so, it’s immediately apparent that it’s almost impossible to believe that he’s being sincere. This isn’t only because his previously expressed views predispose me to distrust him, or because the Keynes-as-feckless-homosexual idea turns out to have a long heritage among like-minded commentators. It’s also because there’s something about “apologising unreservedly” for views you’ve expressed that doesn’t add up. Let’s consider the possibilities here. It’s technically conceivable that Ferguson suffers from a mental disorder that causes words to emerge from his mouth that have no connection to his true opinions. It’s also technically conceivable that on Thursday, after his speech, he happened to have a conversation in a bar, or pick up a book in his hotel library, that profoundly transformed his attitudes towards gay people or those without children. But leaving those preposterous scenarios aside, there are really only two options. One is that Ferguson didn’t believe what he said, but just says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear; the other is that he believed it then and still believes it now. Neither of which makes him look especially good.

Reuters reporter Nicholas Wapshott adds up Ferguson’s various affiliations and points out that he has a lot riding on the reputation to which he has now done such damage. Ferguson is not only an extremely well-paid lecturer at investors conferences such as the one at which he let his mouth run loose, he also enjoys, according to Wapshott, “a chair at the Harvard Business School; membership of the faculty of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies; a chair at Oxford University; a fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford; a post with the British Conservatives advising on history syllabuses in schools; and an ‘advisory fellowship’ at the Barsanti Military History Center at North Texas University.”

A conservative darling and previously respected historian, Ferguson recently drew considerable media attention for his remarkably specious and fact-challenged Newsweek cover story in support of Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations. Ferguson, perhaps more than any other academic of his generation, has built an extremely successful intellectual brand for himself, most ironically, by exemplifying the anti-intellectual tendency ascribed to neoconservative William Kristol by Bernard-Henri Levy from the latter’s assessment of the strategist and pundit from a 2004 encounter. In an article in The Atlantic, French author Levy, recounting that meeting asks rhetorically of Kristol:

When you uphold one goal of a given faction, do you have to uphold all its goals? … Because you’re in agreement about Iraq, do you have to force yourself to agree with the death penalty, creationism, the Christian Coalition and its pestilential practices? When I have dinner with someone in a restaurant, do I have to order all the courses on the menu? Or, on the contrary, isn’t it the privilege of what we call an intellectual—isn’t it his honor and, at core, his real strength, as well as his duty—to continue to defend his own colors, even the shades of those colors, even and especially when he lends his support to the government on a specific point?

By tying together homosexuality and other effete attributes with a belief in the importance of economic stimulus, as well as working in racism and global warming, Ferguson may be endearing himself to business conferences in search of reliably right-wing speakers, as well as to the audiences of Fox News and the like. But he is quite clearly betraying his chosen vocation as an honest scholar and independent intellectual

Lest I be accused of being unfair, I will let Ferguson speak for himself. Here is an excerpt from an open letter to the Harvard Community posted in The Crimson, the school’s student newspaper, in which he wrote in response to the controversy caused by his remarks:

I doubt very much that any of my vituperative online critics have made a comparable effort to understand the nature and dire consequences of prejudice. For the self-appointed inquisitors of internet, it is always easier to accuse than seriously to inquire … those who seek to demonize error, rather than forgive it, are among the most insidious enemies of academic freedom.

Shame on us.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

President Barack Obama answered questions from the press on April 30, 2013, regarding chemical-weapons use in Syria. Though many senators are clamoring for heightened U.S. involvement in the crisis, none has suggested responsible ways of doing so.

Syria, as the cliche goes, is a “problem from Hell.” Listening to conservative experts on the Sunday morning talk shows, however, it all appears to be pretty simple. As New York Times correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg noted:

On Sunday, several leading Republicans—including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, both of whom are members of the Armed Services Committee—used appearances on television talk shows to warn that failure to intervene in Syria would embolden nations like Iran and North Korea.

Remarkably, these critics appeared to know, apparently instinctively, what the leaders of other nations were thinking. According to Sen. Graham (R-SC) on CBS’s “Face the Nation”:

If we keep this hands-off approach to Syria, this indecisive action toward Syria, kind of not knowing what we’re going to do next, we’re going to start a war with Iran because Iran’s going to take our inaction in Syria as meaning we’re not serious about their nuclear weapons program. … The whole region is going to fall into chaos.

Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added on the ABC News program “This Week,” that “more than just Syria, Iran is paying attention to this. North Korea is paying attention to this.” Most enthusiastic, perhaps, is 35-year-old Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who told Politico that the United States should go all in on Syria by offering “lethal assistance” to the rebels and possibly a no-fly zone policed by U.S. war planes together with its naval fleet. Sounding as if he were speaking of Vietnam in 1965, or perhaps Iraq in 2003, he announced, “The president’s credibility, and therefore America’s credibility, is … on the line.”

Also on Sunday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) insisted, according to the AP, “For America to sit on the sidelines and do nothing is a huge mistake.” This may be correct, but to say that the United States is sitting on the sidelines in Syria is flagrantly false. As the pro-intervention John Judis explained in The New Republic:

The administration also announced sanctions against the Syrian government, but couldn’t get the Russians and Chinese to go along with a Security Council resolution on sanctions. In 2012, the administration began sending humanitarian and later “non-lethal” aid to the opposition, including trucks and communications equipment. This year, the administration began training opposition forces, and there have been reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is working to provide arms, but American aid, along with that from Arab countries and Turkey, has not been enough to tilt the contest in the opposition’s favor.

This is quite a bit of involvement when one considers that, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll, the vast majority of Americans (62 percent to 24 percent) don’t think the United States has a responsibility to intervene in Syria.

This number changes when one adds the possibility that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its opponents, with 45 percent of Americans favoring military intervention and 31 percent opposing, according to the Pew Research Center. President Barack Obama said that this would constitute a “red line” for the United States, and while such weapons were apparently used in the conflict, we don’t know “how they were used, when they were used, who used them.”

The problem is figuring out what to do about all of the above. An estimated 70,000 people have already lost their lives in the Syrian conflict, and the 1 million or so refugees fleeing the situation threaten to destabilize Syria’s nervous neighbors. President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has a horrible human-rights record, regardless of the sarin gas controversy, but the rebels may be no better from the standpoint of human rights and/or U.S. interests.

Groups with ties to Al Qaeda have grown in influence in the resistance, as Ben Hubbard reported this weekend for The New York Times. It appears likely that a rebel victory might result in a chaotic bloodbath, a pro-Jihadist Islamic regime supporting terrorism, massive human-rights violations, or some nightmarish combination of all three. Hubbard explains:

In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

And don’t forget, nothing about the Assad regime’s behavior implies it is going to go quietly.

But, as a Sunday New York Times editorial explains:

For all their exhortations, what the senators and like-minded critics have not offered is a coherent argument for how a more muscular approach might be accomplished without dragging the United States into another extended and costly war and how it might yield the kind of influence and good will for this country that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have not.

To be honest, I would have no idea what to do here. I’m really happy it’s the decision of people such as President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry rather than yours truly. None of their options is going to yield a peaceful outcome consistent with the liberal Western values of human rights and democracy. It’s not even clear which combination of actions is more likely to stop the slaughter or prevent the continued collapse of the country and its incipient threat to Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and so on. The potential use of chemical weapons makes the situation all the more problematic without pointing toward any apparent solution. And the implied effect of the U.S. response in Syria on regimes such as North Korea and Iran is entirely hypothetical.

Many of the same people making this argument for a U.S military response today insisted a decade ago that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would have a helpful deterrent effect on these same regimes when, in fact, it appears to have done just the opposite. Much the same could be said about Vietnam. Military-minded critics will attack the administration no matter what the result since no available options can “solve” the Syrian crisis. For all the expertise in apparent in hawkish neoconservative circles, clairvoyance remains in short supply.

Three members of the Center for American Progress have attempted to come up with a baseline policy designed to respond to the current situation in light of what they believe to be the Assad regime’s likely use of chemical weapons. Peter Juul, Rudy deLeon, and Brian Katulis suggest “three steps the United States can take going forward to lead the response to these concerns”:

1. Demand an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on the Assad regime’s likely chemical-weapons use.
2. Engage NATO and regional partners in planning the U.S. response.
3. Request that NATO and other allies begin planning for a major multinational refugee relief mission in Jordan.

These appear to be steps that will allow the international community to engage the humanitarian crisis and plan for the future without tying our hands, risking the lives of our troops, or pretending we know how to read the minds of our adversaries. What’s more, none of them appears likely to make this awful situation even worse. They may not work for a politician trying to portray machismo with a Sunday morning sound bite, but then again, reality—and prudence—rarely do.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/The Advocate, Arthur D. Lauck

Gov. Bobby Jindal delivers a speech to the lawmakers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Monday, April 8, 2013, announcing that he has shelved his plan to eliminate income taxes and raise sales tax.

The first time I clicked on this Politico article, titled “Obama, class warrior,” I had to check my calendar. Had I forgotten April Fools Day? What else could explain what otherwise struck me as a purposeful—indeed, expertly executed—parody of a Politico article?

Authored by Jonathan Martin and John F. Harris, the article “reported” that, “There was nothing especially subtle about the way [President] Barack Obama played the politics of class resentment against [Republican presidential candidate] Mitt Romney in 2012.” And the reason for this, they added, was “nothing especially mysterious.” Apparently, “class warfare works.”

Sadly, it was Tax Day, not April Fools Day. Politico was devoting 2,300 words to this accusation without actually ever addressing the issue of whether Gov. Romney and the Republican Party were also practicing the politics of class warfare—indeed, without any real attention to the reality of the candidate’s proposed policies. That fact means it was intended as a serious analysis, rather than as mere propaganda for the wealthy and their political representatives.

Oddly, the authors do find a Republican operative—Pete Wehner—who explains to them that back in the real world, the issue at hand is not President Obama’s embrace of the politics of “class warfare,” but the fact that Republicans have actually been conducting class war against the poor and middle classes for decades. Granted, he isn’t quite that straightforward, but the message is the same nonetheless. According to Politico:

… Wehner, who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House, compared the situation to the West Wing conversations he participated in when the Iraq war turned unpopular. “We didn’t have a messaging problem, we had a ‘facts on the ground problem,’” said Wehner. “And now Republicans have a ‘facts on the ground problem’ in addition to a messaging problem.”

Were the authors to show any interest in these “facts on the ground,” they might have discovered, as the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out on the very same day, that:

The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes—far lower than mere millionaires, who pay about 25 percent of their income in taxes, and about the same as those earning a mere $200,000 to $500,000. And in 2009, 116 of the top 400 earners—almost a third—paid less than 15 percent of their income in taxes.

This is just one of many reasons, as Stiglitz notes, that “the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled since 1979, and that the share going to the top 0.1 percent has almost tripled, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.”

If you consider the explosion of economic inequality that this country has recently experienced to be as much a fact of life as, say, the weather, then keep in mind that it requires actual actions of men and women to make it so—similar to, come to think of it, the weather these days. Stiglitz points out that the degree to which the United States has seen this gap widen is unique among advanced industrial nations. And, on the basis of the data, it’s not possible to argue that such inequality is necessary to spur economic growth—that’s an ideological assertion if ever there was one. According to the evidence, Germany:

… has managed to maintain its status as a center of advanced manufacturing, even though its top income-tax rate exceeds America’s by a considerable margin. And in general, our top tax rate kicks in at much higher incomes. Denmark, for example, has a top tax rate of more than 60 percent, but that applies to anyone making more than $54,900. The top rate in the United States, 39.6 percent, doesn’t kick in until individual income reaches $400,000 (or $450,000 for a couple). Only three O.E.C.D. countries—South Korea, Canada and Spain—have higher thresholds.

The intricacies of the U.S. tax code, especially the lower tax rates instituted on capital gains and “carried interest” than on earned income, do not interest the authors. They apparently believe that when President Obama “brayed” that Gov. Romney “thinks that someone who makes $20 million a year, like him, should pay a lower [tax] rate than a cop or a teacher who makes $50,000,” that the president was playing a divisive campaign trick to get himself elected. They leave no room for the option that, perhaps, President Obama was merely stating a fact.

In fact, as I pointed out in a lengthy examination of Gov. Romney and the Republican proposals last fall for The Nation, Gov. Romney’s economic proposals included an additional $10.7 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years, above and beyond the already deeply regressive Bush-era tax cuts, with fully 33 percent directed toward the top 0.1 percent. The fine print called for a reduction in both individual and corporate tax rates, as well as the complete elimination of both the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. If this had become law, the net result would likely have been that the superwealthy—those who enjoy an income in the vicinity of $3 million annually—got to keep an additional $250,000 at a cost of $9 trillion in lost revenue to the U.S. Treasury.

This would have been in addition to the provisions of the “Ryan plan,” a budget proposal embraced by Gov. Romney—and obviously by his choice for vice president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the plan—and passed by a margin of 235 to 193 in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Among its provisions were a proposed rise in the Medicare eligibility age for future retirees and a retraction in Medicaid coverage, which, according to the calculations of the Urban Institute, would result in the loss of Medicaid coverage for between 14 million and 27 million Americans by 2021. Meanwhile, another 30 million people—many of them children—would lose the insurance made available to them under Obamacare.

Amazingly, even after all this, Politico still thinks it is President Obama who is the one practicing “class warfare.” Consistent with its journalistic ethos, the news organization turns to the issue of personality rather than actual policy to help readers navigate the issue, as though the rhetoric is more important than reality. The authors quote Stuart Stevens, top strategist of Gov. Romney’s failed campaign, to explain that mere “cosmetic” changes to the party could be effective enough, and that, “I don’t think [Louisiana Gov.] Bobby Jindal has a class problem.”

Actually, bad choice there Stuart (and Politico). Gov. Jindal, as it happens, is fresh off getting his political hat handed to him after trying—and failing—to overturn Louisiana’s tax code in a way that would have shifted the largest burden of the system from corporations and the wealthy to the poor and middle class. Gov. Jindal himself admitted that this was an embarrassing defeat when he withdrew his proposals and explained that legislators and citizens alike told him, “Governor, you’re moving too fast, and we aren’t sure that your plan is the best way to do it.” According to The New York Times’s Campbell Robertson:

All along, opposition to the tax swap was growing broader and more bipartisan by the day. Clergy members urged the governor to drop the plan, saying it could hurt the poor, while the state’s most prominent chamber of commerce group came out against the plan for its potential impact on businesses.

Gov. Jindal’s popularity, according to a recent poll, has now dropped below that of President Obama in Louisiana, a heavily red state that Gov. Romney carried with nearly 60 percent of the vote. So, as it happens, maybe Gov. Jindal does, in fact, have a rather significant class problem.

Finally, as if to make the parody complete, the article contains this insight:

For Obama, this spring’s fights over class represent both a political challenge and a definitional moment. His most consistent argument—that higher taxes on the well-to-do are the essential element in preserving popular government benefits to the middle-class and poor—is in tension with his most consistent promise, that his presidency will break Washington gridlock and elevate problem-solving over ideological purity.

Got that? President Obama’s “most consistent promise,” according to these guys, is to “break Washington gridlock and elevate problem-solving over ideological purity.” What, pray tell, is standing in the way of that? Well, President Obama never promised to “break Washington gridlock.” He promised to try. And infuriating much of his party by becoming the first-ever Democrat since President Franklin D. Roosevelt to propose a reduction in Social Security payments as an opening offer of bipartisanship would appear to go pretty far down that road.

But as I read in Politico on the very same not-April Fools Day, Senate Minority Leader “Mitch McConnell in no mood for bipartisanship.” And as that article accurately points out, “That’s just the Senate. House Republicans, their own seats made even safer by redistricting, are in no hurry bring up immigration, gun control or revenue issues or cave in to Obama or Democrats.”

The reality of the above is that Republicans have no interest in cooperating with Democrats, and they are not afraid to say so. But similar to these same Republicans, Politico’s ace reporters are still finding a way to blame President Obama for this gridlock because, well, just because.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Lauren Victoria Burke

Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer attended a 2006 Supreme Court's ruling that upheld limitless corporate donations to politicians. The decision came with an important addendum: Don't expect things to change anytime soon.

Fred Wertheimer wrote a new op-ed this week arguing for campaign-finance reform, including the need for public financing of elections to help reduce corporate influence in our elections. This one happens to be in Politico, but given the level of importance and longevity of the issue, it could’ve been anyone making the same argument in any news outlet at almost any time in the past 40 or more years.

Wertheimer has been a Washington institution since he joined the citizens’ lobby Common Cause. He is now the president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to strengthen democracy and empower citizens in the political process. Unlike most political institutions in Washington, Democracy 21 hits Democrats just as hard as Republicans.

I arrived in D.C. in the summer of 1982 to work in the public interest community, and Wertheimer was already a macher of considerable proportions. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him, but I always admired his type: the person who comes to Washington to fight the good fight, but loses, then loses again, then loses some more, all while watching his opponents move on to positions not only of power and influence but also great wealth.

I’m sure this assessment is a little unfair, and Wertheimer can probably point to a few victories over the years. But the fact is, no single problem plaguing American politics is more vexing than that of the power of money in politics. I’ve written about this problem more times than I can count, most recently in a lengthy article on Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and the future of liberalism for The Nation.

Wertheimer’s recent op-ed is devoted to Democracy 21’s newest project to reform the campaign-finance laws of New York state, where Gov. Cuomo has expressed support for reform, but has yet to take specific actions to accomplish that goal. Following his victories on marriage equality and gun control in the state legislature, however, he appears to be ready to make clean elections a priority.

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting with corporate leaders who favor such reform that was organized by the Committee for Economic Development and the Brennan Center for Justice. I was pleasantly surprised by the passion Gov. Cuomo, who was the featured speaker, expressed regarding the topic:

People … have become disassociated from their government, and they just don’t believe and they don’t trust and they think that government isn’t about them. And that is a killer. … Nothing will restore the [public’s] trust more than campaign finance [reform]. And until we have [that], nothing else will.

As Wertheimer explains:

The proposed New York state reform effort is modeled on a New York City system that has been successfully used for the past 15 years to finance city elections. Under the system, the first $175 of a contribution to a New York City candidate is matched with public funds at a 6:1 ratio. Thus, if a donor contributes $150, the candidate ends up with a total of $1,225. According to studies, the New York City system has resulted in many new small donors and a more diverse group of contributors.

This is crucial because, as Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told me, “Most people recognize the biggest problem with our political system is that elected officials have the wrong priorities because they spend so much time raising money from a few special interests whom they need to pay for their elections.” Norden calls public-matching funds for small contributions “the game changer” in the current system of legalized corruption because it encourages small donors to give money to campaigns, which makes them feel like they can make a difference.

The issue of campaign-finance reform is also a popular one. More than 80 percent of every ideological and partisan subgroup expressed agreement that, “There is way too much corporate money in politics” and supported a “systemic solution to the problem of the role of money in politics,” according to a fall 2012 study published by Demos. And a December 2012 survey of 504 New Yorkers conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Public Campaign Action Fund found that close to 80 percent of them support a reform package that included the public financing of elections.

The problem, however, is that while such support is wide, it is rarely deep. Since it is an electoral-process issue, it does not frequently excite voters—and even when it does, it usually fails to excite reporters. This is ironic because the issue of campaign finance is the essence of “good government”—for which the free press exists to monitor. The editorial page of The New York Times is dedicated to raising the profile of the issue, for instance, and while that newspaper does not ignore the role of money in its news pages, it also does not always do a good job of demonstrating that this corruption costs citizens real money.

To be fair to journalists, that is not an easy task. In the first place, such stories are complicated and are rarely exciting to read. This is especially a problem in a media environment that is driven by sensationalism and suffers from severely diminished resources. Second, the power of money influences so many aspects of our lives that it can be an enormous challenge merely to conceive of, much less report on, them in an understandable manner.

To give you an idea of the scope, on the morning I wrote this column, The New York Times published a terrific report on the manner in which financial institutions evade regulation by hiring former staffers of the very congressional committees and government agencies that were set up to regulate them. Then, these financial institutions pay these former watchdogs many multiples of what they could possibly earn working for the public sector. Another similarly revealing Times report explains the way in which ex-staffers of powerful U.S. senators use their personal connections to help corporations actually write the regulations and tax laws that govern their industries. These kinds of stories, however, only create the kind of powerful narrative that can force politicians to act in times of financial panic. And this is in no way the fault of journalists. Rather, it’s another unattractive feature of our dysfunctional political and media cultures.

Upstate New Yorkers recently saw a state Senate election that gave many observers a rare ray of hope. In a district that the Republicans gerrymandered to their advantage, Cecilia “Cece” Tkaczyk (D-NY) beat a wealthy incumbent named Assemblyman George Amedore, despite being outspent and well behind in the polls a month before Election Day. She won by turning her campaign into a crusade for publicly financed elections and making that little local election into a referendum on democracy itself. Amedore and his supporters complained of a “Cece tax” that they said would be necessary to pay for publicly financed elections, but Tkaczyk’s support surged. And despite a last-ditch George W. Bush-style attack on the vote counters attempting to disqualify votes, 73 days after the polls closed, Tkaczyk won by a mere 18 votes.

Gov. Cuomo did nothing to help Tkaczyk in her quest to defeat a Tea Party Republican because of differences with her on “other issues,” according to one of his aides. He is also a successful fundraiser from private donors, who, because of New York’s lax laws, do not need to reveal themselves. Now longtime soldiers in this fight find themselves betting on Gov. Cuomo as their hope to transform New York’s electoral system and rejuvenate the issue nationwide. It may yet work. But for this to happen, journalists are going to have to find a way to make this process issue real for millions of Americans as Tkaczyk was able to do in her door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor campaign in upstate New York.

Is this possible? Perhaps not, but for the likes of Fred Wertheimer and his comrades, it’s just another day in the life of a never-ending battle to help protect American “democracy” from itself.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Ron Edmonds

In this December 13, 2005, file photo, then-White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan under President George W. Bush adresses questions about the Iraq war from members of the media.

We’re three weeks into our “Lessons Learned from the Iraq War”—more accurately titled, “Lessons Unlearned.” One of the most glaring of these is the notion of a “liberal media” during the war. Given President George W. Bush’s deceptive case for invading Iraq, a “lapdog media” is more accurate.

Alas, I have a horse in this fight. Ten years ago I published my fourth book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, just a few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq. Although I finished the book months before its February 2003 publication date, I was able to include material about the run-up to the war. But had I published the book after the attack was launched, a chapter on media and the Iraq war would have solidified my argument.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, a conservative libertarian, has successfully studied how prewar hawks attempt to elude moral, intellectual, and political responsibility for their bad judgments of 10 years ago. In one of his columns, Friedersdorf examined a column by law professor Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit.com, in which he mocked a blog post by yours truly written in early 2003 for msnbc.com. In the blog post I criticized The New York Times for an “over-hyped story” on “the top-right column of page one” in which it gave credence to the Bush administration’s “phony prediction that the war Bush has decided to launch, without provocation or legal justification, will cost only $60 billion or less in constant dollars than the 1991 Gulf War.” Reynolds thought my notion hilarious. He quipped: “ALTERMAN CLAIMS that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has taken over The New York Times. I tried to reach Ann Coulter for comment, but all I got was a recording of what seemed to be her voice, saying ‘Buwhahaha!’”

How many times did we hear different iterations of this? From The New York Times, The Washington Post, the networks—and all of them were supposedly liberal, anti-Bush, and anti-war. If they were in favor of invading Iraq—or even published information that might help the Bush administration make its case—you were a complete nutcase to question it, right?

Um, wrong.

Whether one looks at the editorial or the news pages, one finds a decided slant in favor of the war across all the mainstream media—and much of the blogosphere, as Friedersdorf points out. The Washington Post, for example, ran 27 separate editorials in favor of the war. It published op-ed after op-ed by the likes of George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, and dozens of others making the case for war, while only publishing a few from skeptics. Simultaneously, the paper buried the skeptical—and correct—reports from national security journalist Walter Pincus. His arguments punched holes in many specious arguments about alleged weapons of mass destruction and phony meetings with Saddam Hussein, but The Post denied them the attention amid the relentlessly pro-war media narrative. The Post’s editors admitted in retrospect that they hyped the administration’s case over and over again.

How about The New York Times? Yes, its editorial page was appropriately cautious, but many of its pundits and news stories were not. Remember William Safire insisting that Hussein’s representatives had met with Al Qaeda in Prague to help plan the 9/11 attack?  Remember Bill Keller’s famous “I Can’t Believe I’m a Hawk” column? Remember the deeply flawed reporting of Judith Miller, who served as a megaphone for administration war hawks and regularly aired her opinions on the front page of The Times? Her misleading stories regarding Iraqi weaponry were so compelling that even Vice President Dick Cheney found them useful when seeking to scare the nation into war. And then there was The Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman and his incredible boast on “The Charlie Rose Show”: “well, suck on this. OK? That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

I could go on. The New Yorker? It was not only pro-war in its editorials but also in its main reporting from its stars, Jeffery Goldberg and later George Packer. The New Republic was pro-war on virtually every page of the magazine. Time? Newsweek? The Los Angeles Times? The Wall Street Journal? All followed a similar pattern and this included not only agitating for war but also mocking those who dared to differ. In retrospect, the only major mainstream news service that can hold up its head and claim that it told the whole story is Knight-Ridder—a news organization located mostly outside the Beltway. McClatchy took over the newspaper company in 2006, but budget cuts have since significantly weakened the organization.

One can argue about the individual defenses. One can make the case—as did many Democratic politicians in retrospect—that Americans have a right to believe their president when he insists on the need to meet what he insists is an imminent threat.

But the job of journalists is to verify these arguments, not simply to parrot the propaganda from a conservative Republican president and his staff. Journalists even went further than just echoing the arguments, and even ignored traditional journalistic practices in order to dismiss or even mock the counter-evidence provided by numerous expert sources. Given all this, it becomes obvious that if there was any bias at all, then it was hardly a liberal one.

The Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands of people and any number of naïve dreams from its boosters and cheerleaders. One notion that should have died forever is that of a “liberal media.”

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Marco Jose Sanchez

Ray Jacques reads the San Francisco Chronicle's war special section inside a Starbucks coffee shop in San Francisco. Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, many members of the media who supported the war in 2003 are choosing not to comment.

For better or worse, the Vietnam War proved itself to be a learning experience for Americans and the U.S. government. In the military, it resulted in what became known as “The Weinberger Doctrine,” which set up a number of demanding conditions for a president to consider before committing significant numbers of troops to foreign wars. For the public, it led to the derisively termed “Vietnam Syndrome,” which combines skepticism toward the nation’s foreign policymakers with weariness about America’s often self-imposed global “policing” role in other countries.

It is unwise to rely on counterfactual history, but after the Vietnam War, it is worth examining the U.S. military’s avoidance of certain unpopular wars.  Consider, for example, the opinion conveyed by the bumper sticker “’El Salvador’ is Spanish for ‘Vietnam.’” These kind of sentiments, coupled with the military’s own desire to avoid wars that lacked strong public support, prevented U.S. proxy wars in Central America, southern Africa, and possibly the Middle East—at least for a little while.

In many respects, former President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was an even greater catastrophe than Vietnam—one that is even less morally and intellectually defensible. And yet, as a nation, we appear to have learned virtually nothing this time around. As Peter Baker noted in The New York Times, “a conspiracy of silence” surrounded the recently observed 10th anniversary of the invasion. “Republicans and Democrats agreed that they did not really want to talk about the Iraq war,” wrote Baker.

This past month, the media has sought out some of the war’s most vocal supporters to reflect on lessons learned, if any, from their errors 10 years ago. A small percentage of the war hawks who originally supported the invasion sought to defend their initial views. An even smaller group apologized for their errors. But the overwhelming tendency among these formerly loquacious pundits and ex-officials was to change the subject away from the war itself. Read, for instance, George Packer’s 10th-anniversary essay in The New Yorker or Paul Berman’s in The New Republic or Kenneth Pollack’s interview featured in Ezra Klein’s column on Bloomberg.com to see if you can determine whether these one-time armchair warriors were expressing regret, or attempting to excuse their own lack of judgment. I sure couldn’t.

Then again, why should they reconsider? It’s not as if anyone—with the possible exception of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Bush—paid any kind of professional price for their colossal errors regarding Iraq. Certainly nobody’s career was hurt by the inaccuracy of rosy predictions about the war. Indeed, the opposite proved true: The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol perhaps predicted the outcome of the war most inaccurately, and yet he ended up with opinion columns in Time magazine and on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Once the war’s failure became clear, it’s as if the entire mainstream media decided to adopt the sentiments expressed by the liberal Washington Post pundit Richard Cohen, borrowed from the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.”

Upon rereading their prewar arguments, one can understand the liberal pundits’ desire to change the subject 10 years later rather than revisit their fallacious arguments, or try to draw larger lessons from their mistakes. The liberal hawks—almost exclusively men—became men of ideas wanting to be men of action. They embraced what the historian Christopher Lasch called “the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals”—to be bold, to reject doubt, and to fight with ideas rather than guns.

Instead of careful cost-benefit analyses of invading Iraq, these intellectual war hawks gave us airy phrases that did not address the actual difficulties the United States was likely to face in Iraq after the initial fighting was over. Many preferred to focus on what the war would do for America’s self-regard as a nation. When the twin towers went down in 2001, the liberal journalist George Packer began a collected set of essays called “The Fight is for Democracy.” Ten years later, he reminisced about his first thoughts after 9/11: “Maybe this will make us better.”

Packer and other liberal hawks, including Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Cohen, David Rieff, Roger Cohen, and Jacob Weisberg, gained popularity in the media despite a gap in their lack of military experience. Indeed, none possessed any particular professional expertise on military strategy, Iraqi society, or the Arab world more generally. They saw their own ideas, as the neoconservative writer Jacob Heilbrunn would write, “as weapons in a moral struggle.”

Indeed, most liberal hawks gave little thought to the Bush administration’s ability to carry out the complicated tasks that would follow the relatively simple task of facing a badly armed third-world military force in open battle. Apparently they expected the postwar reconstruction of Iraqi governance and civil society to take care of itself. The hawks flattered themselves that they knew bigger, more important things than such trivial details. Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens made this plain in his 2010 memoir, when he casually observed that he and his comrades “rather tended to assume that things of [the] more practical sort were being taken care of.”

That’s as far as they got before making assertions and statements about why we needed to go to war. Now take a look at this chart to see where the war ultimately got us. The Vietnam War led to many tragic results, but at least it briefly taught the United States that wars in far-off nations were not endeavors to be taken lightly, or without an understanding of the culture we were seeking to reform—at least until 2003.

Many of the same people who treated the cautionary signals regarding Iraq so blithely 10 years ago now appear to be agitating for yet another adventure, this time in Iran. It would behoove us to ensure that we focus on the lessons of that catastrophe before embarking on yet another one. This time it won’t do to merely change the subject.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/J Scott Applewhite

Secretary of State Colin Powell tells reporters that Iraq's weapons disclosure "totally fails'' to meet a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an accurate, full and complete inventory of weapons, at the the State Department in Washington, Thursday, December 19, 2002.

It’s a tribute to the good sense of the broader American public that on the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq, a majority of Americans are aware that the entire enterprise was a bad idea, according to a poll by the Gallup Organization.  As Eric Boehlert noted on the Media Matters for America blog, “To date, that conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 8,000 U.S. service members and contractors and more than 130,000 Iraqi citizens, and is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury more than two trillion dollars.”

The Gallup’s write-up points out that, “Majorities or near-majorities have viewed the conflict as a mistake continuously since August 2005, the current 53 percent is down from the high point of 63 percent in April 2008.” Despite this widely held view, the folks who battled to defend their misguided judgments 10 years ago—largely but not exclusively neoconservatives—are continuing their bloated claims about the purposes and benefits of the war. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, took to Twitter to proclaim that, “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.” And yet a majority of Americans are able to see the truth through this ongoing propaganda offensive.

It is no easy task to focus on just one deception when examining the Bush administration’s success of selling the war to the public. There were so many lies—some deliberate and some believed to be true by the tellers who were possibly under the influence of self-hypnosis. But I am most fascinated by the case for Iraq’s alleged cache of “weapons of mass destruction,” or WMDs, and the belief that Baghdad possessed not only the willingness but also the capacity to use these weapons against the United States.

These quotes from a range of high-level Bush administration officials offer a glimpse into how the administration “proved” to Americans that Iraq posed a threat to our national security:

• Vice President Dick Cheney: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Speech to VFW National Convention, August 26, 2002.
• Secretary Rumsfeld: “We know they have weapons of mass destruction. … There isn’t any debate about it.” September 2002.
• Gen. Tommy Franks, then-head of the Central Command: “There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.” Press conference, March 22, 2003.
• Secretary of State Colin Powell: “I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now.” Remarks to reporters, May 4, 2003.

As I noted in The Book on Bush, statements such as these enabled neoconservative pundits such as Robert Kagan and William Kristol to claim that, “No one disputes the nature of the threat,” and that, “Nor is there any doubt that, after September 11, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction pose a kind of danger to us that we hadn’t grasped before.” Back then, this was the “price of admission” to be taken seriously in the debate regarding the decision to attack Iraq.

We now know that these claims were all false. We also know that members of the Bush administration knew they were lying at the time. In early October 2003, for instance, David Kay, the Bush administration’s chief investigator, formally told Congress that after searching for nearly six months and spending more than $300 million, U.S. forces and CIA experts had found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, and had discovered that the nation’s nuclear program was in only “the very most rudimentary” state.

Undoubtedly, the administration’s most effective communicator on the issue was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was widely thought to be the most cautious—and hence the most trustworthy—member of the administration’s foreign policy team. In actuality, Secretary Powell personally doubted the case he was making to the media about the dangers Iraq presented to the United States and the world. At a meeting in New York just before he was to present the case for war to the United Nations, Secretary Powell expressed hesitation about the war to U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, according to a transcript of the conversation published in The Guardian. Secretary Powell allegedly told the British foreign secretary that he feared that the evidence might “explode in their faces” once the facts were known. U.S. News & World Report published a more lurid story recalling the interaction, in which the U.S. secretary of state threw the documents and called them “bullshit.”

In fact, two years earlier in February 2001 at a meeting with Egypt’s foreign minister in Cairo, Secretary Powell defended the U.N. sanctions program already in place against Iraq. He noted the success of U.S. containment of Hussein and regarding the sanctions, he explained that, “Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

Of course, Secretary Powell was right the first time. But many members of the news media proved eager accomplices in this misinformation campaign, just as they had during the Gulf of Tonkin episode that began America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam. During this incident, newspapers and newsweeklies published lurid accounts of a battle that never took place based on fabricated stories passed along to them by the Johnson administration—a depressing phenomenon that I describe in great detail in my book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Presidential Deception And Its Consequences. The media again fell victim to presidential deception as the Bush administration pushed for the invasion of Iraq.

Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register, examined the media reaction to Powell’s U.N. presentation in great detail. Cranberg observed that the secretary’s speech “cited almost no verifiable sources, and was filled with unattributed assertions, vague references, and the like.” Despite this, virtually everyone in the mainstream media swallowed it hook, line, and proverbial sinker.

Surveying the print and broadcast coverage of the speech, Cranberg found descriptions of Powell’s presentation that claimed it was “a massive array of evidence,” “a detailed and persuasive case,” “a powerful case,” “a sober, factual case,” “an overwhelming case,” “a compelling case,” “the strong, credible and persuasive case,” and “a persuasive, detailed accumulation of information.” Furthermore, the media concluded that “the core of his argument was unassailable,” that it was “a smoking fusillade … a persuasive case for anyone who is still persuadable,” “an accumulation of painstakingly gathered and analyzed evidence,” and that “only the most gullible and wishful thinking souls can now deny that Iraq is harboring and hiding weapons of mass destruction.” Further attacking those who did not support the war, the media argued that “the skeptics asked for proof; they now have it,” claiming the presentation was “a much more detailed and convincing argument than any that has previously been told,” “an ironclad case … incontrovertible evidence,” “succinct and damning evidence … the case is closed”—and the list continues.

I was reminded of the panic over Iraq’s imaginary WMD cache recently not only because this month marks the 10th anniversary of the invasion, but also because the Pew Research Center released its annual “State of the News Media” report this week. According to a section titled “Lessons Learned About the Media from the 2012 Election,” the authors observe that:

Journalists are a shrinking source in shaping the candidate narratives, while campaigns and partisans have assumed a much larger role in defining the press discourse. Reporters (and talk show personalities) account for about half as many of the assertions about the candidates’ character and biography as they did 12 years ago—27 percent versus 50 percent in 2000. At the same time, campaigns, their surrogates and allies now account for nearly half of these themes, 48 percent, up from 37 percent in 2000. That shift, giving partisans a bigger role in shaping the media narrative, has been gradual and may reflect in part the shrinking reportorial resources in newsrooms.

In other words, the reporting profession is actually moving away from the ideal that their job is not to simply repeat what their sources say—nor to give them unmediated access to their audiences—but instead to submit the claims to tough-minded scrutiny. When combined with the flight from reality that characterizes the modern conservative movement and drives both the words and actions of Republican candidates, we now have a formula for more disinformation in the future, and sadly, more catastrophes akin to the Iraq invasion.

No one can predict where and when these potential calamities will occur. But when a democracy is constantly fed misinformation, and those charged with correcting it pass it along unedited and unchecked, bad things happen. Iraq may be the worst of these—let us hope—but it certainly won’t be the last.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari

Andrew Breitbart, center, flanked by James O'Keefe III, left, and Hannah Giles, takes part in a news conference, Wednesday, October 21, 2009, at the National Press Club in Washington.

Erick Erickson of CNN and the conservative RedState blog recently announced that RedState plans to hire a few real reporters for the site. This is ironic for a number of reasons. First, Erickson is best known—to liberals, anyway—for calling former Associate Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat-f***ing child molester” and First Lady Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy.” Second, as The American Prospect editor Paul Waldman writes, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson noted the need for conservatives to take up the cause of actual journalism at a Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a few years ago; was subsequently booed; and later created a website where reporting, when it’s there, often turns out to be false.

Thing is, there appears to be a genuine and unbridgeable conflict between reporting and right-wing ideology. You can see it in action nearly every day, just by briefly surfing the Internet. I did this, for instance, on the day I set out to write this column and happened on this story: “O’Keefe partner pays $50K to fired ACORN worker.”

Here we learn that Hannah Giles, partner to admitted criminal and celebrated conservative “journalist” James O’Keefe, was forced to pay $50,000 to the same former ACORN employee to whom O’Keefe was forced to pay $100,000. The payments were the result of a legal settlement in which the worker, Juan Carlos Vera, successfully sued the two for invasion of privacy. This violation, which included illicitly taping Vera against California law, was part of a sting operation undertaken by the two, who then released the video to various media outlets with deceptive edits—all of which was funded by the late conservative author and commentator Andrew Breitbart.

In the video O’Keefe and Giles made it appear as if Vera had been eager to help the masquerading couple smuggle underage prostitutes into the United States from Mexico. But in fact the opposite occurred, as Vera immediately contacted law enforcement authorities to report the proposed crime. O’Keefe and Giles, together with Breitbart—and unfortunately, many lazy members of the mainstream media—misreported the story based on the falsehoods they purposely passed on. Why did they go ahead with their false story? As O’Keefe later explained: “I did want to follow up. I just didn’t end up following up.”

Leaving aside the damage their lies did both to Vera and to ACORN, which no longer exists, it’s important to note that these people are still considered models among many on the right for the kind of “journalism” they believe in which conservatives should engage. The name “Breitbart” is still carried on by a group of the late activist’s acolytes under the mistaken impression that what they are doing, literally in his name, actually constitutes as journalism. Of course, given the various misunderstandings of the term that led to their confusion in the first place, much was lost regarding the notions of original reporting and fact checking. This at least partially explains how the website Breitbart.com could publish a story that attempted to trumpet the “fact” that well-known liberal economist Paul Krugman had declared personal bankruptcy. The article breathlessly “reported”:

Paul Krugman, the economic darling of the left, has filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection, according to Boston.com. Krugman has been the leading advocate for increased deficit spending as the only solution to turn the US economy around. He believes that President Obama needs to be even bolder with continued trillion dollar stimulus programs driving our nation deeper and deeper into debt.

Apparently this Keynesian thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.

Alas, the original story appeared on a website called The Daily Currant—widely considered as a satiric website in the style of The Onion. Of course, minimal journalistic standards, to say nothing of a sense of humor, would have saved them the embarrassment. But these qualities are simply deemed to be irrelevant in the world of conservative journalism.

At this point, my reader may accuse me of picking easy targets from the bottom-feeders of the right-wing journalism world. I’m not actually sufficiently familiar with the pecking order to plead guilty or innocent to the charge, but to demonstrate that it appears to affect every strata of the right-wing journalistic world, take a look at the pundits who are published in the nation’s leading newspapers.

Last week, for instance, The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan took a walk through an airport she found unpleasant, which led her to explain:

I’m in Pittsburgh, making my way to the airport hotel. The people movers are broken and we pull our bags along the dingy carpet. There’s an increasing sense in America now that the facades are intact but the machinery inside is broken.

Got it? The people movers were shut down, she didn’t like the carpet, and as a consequence, “There’s an increasing sense in America now that the facades are intact but the machinery inside is broken.”

As a result of this nutty notion, she simply wishes away the fact of the nearly trillion-dollar stimulus program:

Meanwhile, the president is stuck in his games and his history. He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid.

And let’s not even bother to note that it was kept unfortunately smaller than necessary, as it happens, by Noonan’s conservative allies in Congress and was later pilloried by these same folks as well. And people make fun of Thomas Friedman for drawing conclusions based on the wise cracks of Pakistani cab drivers.

My skeptical reader may now be thinking, “Well, OK, but Noonan works for a newspaper owned by the notorious Rupert Murdoch. What of those conservatives hired to work in the mainstream media?” Well, what about the dean of conservative pundits, The Washington Post’s George F. Will, who is also a star of ABC’s “This Week”? Will has been known to mess up his science when it comes to global warming and offer racist explanations for American voting patterns, but recently he has taken to rewriting history. In honor of the late jurist Robert Bork, at whose wedding Will had the honor of serving as an usher, the pundit attempted to recast Bork’s role in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” during the Watergate scandal. He wrote:

On an October Saturday, when Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, Richardson and his deputy resigned, urging Bork to execute Nixon’s lawful order, which he did. By the two resignations, Bork became acting attorney general, in which capacity he protected the ongoing investigation of Nixon.

In fact, Bork acted as Nixon’s henchman, signing the order that fired Cox and abolishing the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force—an order that the courts later ruled to be illegal. Had Bork been successful, this would have allowed Nixon to stonewall the congressional investigation and remain in office despite the widespread criminal activities he undertook as president. Fortunately, the near-unanimous anger of the public over this egregious power grab forced the president to cave in to appoint a new prosecutor, Leon Jaworkski, and produce the infamous tapes—with 18-and-a-half minutes mysteriously erased—that ultimately led to his downfall.

(At this point I would like to interrupt the above proceedings to note that I have managed to demonstrate all of the above faults of the conservative media without even mentioning Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or the rest of the cable news and talk radio luna-sphere.)

It’s fair to conclude from the examples above that it’s no coincidence that each example of conservative “journalism” one attempts to examine turns out to be fundamentally flawed. The reason is that genuine journalism—the kind that allows the evidence to dictate the story—is inconsistent with the conservative worldview. It’s not that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”—though often it does—it’s just that the deeply ideologically driven understanding of the way the world works on the right is inconsistent with the way things really work. When the world refuses to cooperate with right-wing ideology, it’s the world that’s wrong, not the ideology. And hence the reporting of facts and figures and so forth only gets in the way.

This is why it ought to be a matter of public concern to learn that the Koch brothers are reportedly considering a bid for the Tribune Company newspapers, which would bring them control of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, among others. This would not only significantly reduce the amount of honest reporting in the news media, but it would also vastly increase the amount of ideologically based lies and ideological fantasy deliberately designed to confuse whatever issue is at hand. No less alarmingly, however, the same article explains that “they may face stiff competition in the form of a debt-free, full pocketed media power player named Rupert Murdoch.”

Should either one succeed, it would be the end of the (journalistic) world as we know it, and it’s up to all of us—not just liberals and journalists—to do what we can to preserve and protect what honest sources of journalism we have left.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Samir Mizban

Iraqi women pass by a house destroyed during air campaign at early stages of war, in Baghdad, Iraq, March 18, 2007, ahead of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion on Iraq. The 10th anniversary of the invasion is later this month.

On the unhappy 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, those of us who spoke out against the impending catastrophe a decade ago are naturally tempted to rehearse the argument, particularly given the proclivity of our opponents to question the patriotism, perseverance, and perspicacity of the so-called dovish side. As The Guardian editorializes, “With the passage of time, the judgment of those who took to the streets against the rush to war only looks wiser.”

I will resist this temptation, save for my desire to revisit a single article that appeared on page one of The New York Times on October 9, 2002—roughly six months before the invasion began. Written by Alison Mitchell and Carle Hulse, the piece was titled, “THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE DEBATE; C.I.A. SEES TERROR AFTER IRAQ ACTION.” The article was published on the day that “the Bush administration pushed Congress … for a broad vote to authorize the president to use force against Iraq,” as the authors observed in their lede. But the story’s focus was decidedly inconsistent with the main narrative gripping prewar Washington.

According to the Times reporters, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, writing on behalf of Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, explained that Iraq was not involved in—nor was it planning any—terrorist attacks against the United States. As McLaughlin put it, “‘Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks’ with conventional or chemical or biological weapons against the United States.”

On the other hand, were former Iraq President Saddam Hussein to “conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist action.” Such actions at the time were thought to include either conventional terrorism or even a weapon of mass destruction, as it would be Hussein’s “last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.”

The rest of the article is weighed down by ridiculous quotes from Bush administration officials, including Tenet, insisting that “‘There is no inconsistency’ between the C.I.A. views in [McLaughlin’s] letter and those of the president.”

This was all nonsense, of course. The fundamental facts of the CIA report were clear: Pre-U.S. invasion, Iraq did not pose a terrorist threat to the United States. But if it were to invade, it would likely create an environment that would foster such animosity. Since the entire point of a purported preemptive attack on Iraq was to reduce the terrorist threat to the United States in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, taking action that would, in fact, do the opposite would be something that should have been off the table. After all, it’s not as if The Nation or a liberal think tank issued this warning assessment—it was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The idea that any pundit or even anyone at all could say that they had better information than the CIA would have been ridiculous—nobody has better-quality information about what is happening inside a closed society’s weapons and military programs than the CIA. And to say that the assessment itself was politically motivated—well, the CIA director was a former Republican staffer and a close ally of the president, and hence probably eager to be as loyal to the president as possible.

So how did the war’s supporters manage to overcome this devastating report revealed for all to see on the front page of America’s newspaper of record that shot a hole right through the middle of their argument? Simple: They ignored it. They wanted a war. Period. And they got it. They knew—they just didn’t care.

I thought of this story yet again when I read a column last week by The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, titled, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” in which Klein discovered that many Republicans in Congress professed ignorance about President Barack Obama’s proposals to solve the sequester crisis and thus that “Some of the gridlock in Washington is simply the result of poor information.” Klein goes on to add:

What’s holding an agreement up is, in part, that Republicans are far less willing to compromise on taxes than Democrats are to compromise on Medicare and Social Security. But what shouldn’t be holding an agreement up is that top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.

But as with Iraq, there is the kind of information of which one is unaware and the kind of which one chooses to be unaware. Klein had no trouble disproving the ignorance-based assertions of the Republican leadership with regard to the president’s position. Indeed, the proof was right there in the president’s most recent budget or the president’s plan to replace the sequester. The information is there for anyone who cares enough to click on it, and yet the sequester continues. It continues with powerful and influential pundits like The New York Times columnist—and former executive editor—Bill Keller, for example, who repeated discredited claims about the president’s plans in a recent column that could just as easily have been double checked—in this remarkable case, by reading Bill Keller’s own writing.

And what about that 2002 CIA report on an Iraqi invasion? Well, in addition to everything else that went wrong due to incompetence, corruption, misunderstanding, venality, and dishonesty in the Bush administration and its allies, the invasion turned out to have done exactly what the CIA predicted it would. Its accuracy was revealed in a September 23, 2006, Times article titled, “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.” According to the classified National Intelligence Estimate, which is the combined view of all the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies and was leaked to the reporters, the opening section of the report—titled, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement”—showed that the Iraq war was a primary reason for “the diffusion of jihad ideology.” The report added that “The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” and the reporters further noted that “Broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.”

It is true that knowledge is power. But getting American politicians to act upon that knowledge—or even convincing top pundits and reporters to pay attention to it—well, that’s another matter entirely. Just ask the millions of families of those killed, wounded, or displaced by the pointless and counterproductive American invasion of Iraq on its 10th birthday.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) speaks at a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 14, 2013.

Shortly before Election Day in November, The New York Times published a report about a Congressional Research Service study that had been withdrawn after publication due to demands by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). The economic report, “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945,” “found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth.” This means that increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans would not actually harm the economy in the way congressional Republicans have been asserting.

The study in question did not receive much attention before it was censored. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) mentioned it in a speech at the National Press Club, but only after it was pulled. Speaking to The Times, Sen. Schumer objected to what he termed the “banana republic” aspects of the Republicans’ actions, referring to the idea of a ruling plutocracy making the politically important decisions for the entire nation: “They didn’t like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.”

The study’s findings then began to receive widespread media coverage. Among them:

The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.

However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007–2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.

You can read the entire report, authored by Thomas L. Hungerford, a specialist in public finance with a doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan, here.

The Congressional Research Service is a nonpartisan research and analysis arm of the Library of Congress. Owing to their fear of nonpartisan and nonideological forms of empirical knowledge, Republicans in Congress have sought to undermine not only the service but also the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the American Community Survey—which, as Catherine Rampell of The New York Times Economix blog explained, “tells Americans how poor we are, how rich we are, who is suffering, who is thriving, where people work, what kind of training people need to get jobs, what languages people speak, who uses food stamps, who has access to health care, and so on.”

So far, efforts to thwart these entities have been met with only limited success, but Republicans did defund the Office of Technology Assessment, whose purpose from 1972 to 1995 was to provide Congress with objective analyses of complex scientific and technical issues. The Republican threats against these organizations are certainly not empty ones, and they could very well force them to toe the line—or else.

Nevertheless, the most recent attempt to censor the Congressional Research Service backfired. The report, which demonstrated that lower taxes on the wealthy do not, in fact, lead to more economic growth, would likely have been ignored had congressional Republicans not tried to quash it.

Now the Social Science Research Network, a website devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly social science and humanities research, has posted a new report, also penned by Hungerford, which, if properly understood, would discredit such evidence-starved right-wing assertions even further. It’s called “Changes in Income Inequality Among U.S. Tax Filers between 1991 and 2006: The Role of Wages, Capital Income, and Taxes,” and, unfortunately, congressional Republicans will not be able to quash it. In it, Hungerford examines changes in after-tax income inequality among tax filers between 1991 and 2006. He focuses on the manner in which changes in wages, capital income, and tax policy each helped contribute to the explosion of inequality in American income. The report found that, “By far, the largest contributor to this increase was changes in income from capital gains and dividends.” Under the Clinton administration’s tax code changes, which raised rates on top income earners, some of the inequality in the United States was equalized. But the benefits from these changes were reversed following the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts.

Taken together, these two reports undermine the central tenets of conservative economic philosophy. The right’s argument has always been a simple one: Tax rates on the wealthy must be kept low in order to inspire investment and promote economic growth. Whether this leads to greater inequality is not relevant, as inequality per se is not a problem in the conservative mind—it is merely a fair and accurate reflection of talent and initiative. And in the context of the debate, this argument has always been taken as a matter of faith. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told one reporter in July 2010, “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.”

It has always been difficult to find a genuine economist, even a conservative economist, who would buy into the theory that reducing taxes on the wealthy actually increases revenue. Because it is merely a theory, though, it was difficult to disprove—until now. The evidence doesn’t support it—and all the legislation that has been passed on the basis of this argument has been mistaken. Mistaken too is the right-wing refusal to agree to almost any form of revenue increase in order to avoid the catastrophic coming of the automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester.

Then again, it is at least possible that the theory was less of a mistake than a smokescreen. For if the Republicans were genuinely interested in the goals they profess to be pursuing—that is, greater economic growth for all—it’s unlikely that they would be so eager to quash the evidence when it fails to support their initial assumptions, instead seeking to alter their theory to get to their end goal.

But do you remember former Vice President Dick Cheney’s explanation to then-Commerce Secretary Paul O’Neill as to why the Bush administration was pursuing its tax cuts for the wealthy despite the dangers these cuts posed to America’s fiscal health? “We won the midterms. This is our due.”

The rest, as the great first-century B.C.E Rabbi Hillel the Elder would say, “is commentary.”

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Alex Brandon

President Barack Obama lines up his putt at the Mink Meadows Golf Club on August 25, 2009 in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. Reporters recently became angry with President Obama when they were excluded from his round of golf with Tiger Woods.

According to a much-discussed recent report in Politico, members of the press are frustrated by their lack of face time with President Barack Obama. Their anger apparently boiled over when they found themselves excluded from the president’s golf outing with Tiger Woods over Presidents Day weekend.

Still, it would be hard to find an administration that did not inspire unhappiness among those who have the misfortune of drawing the assignment of covering it for their media outlet. What a remarkably ahistorical bunch these reporters are—and they’re apparently dealing with a collective case of short-term memory loss, too. “He gives interviews not for our benefit, but to achieve his objective,” complained Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS News reporter—as if this were not true of every single politician who has ever given a press interview anywhere, anytime.

It may or may not be true that President Obama is less available to the press corps than previous presidents—though in many respects, that means he is probably telling fewer lies to the media and the people than his predecessors did. But it has always puzzled me why so many members of the press think it important to merely regurgitate a play-by-play of the president’s day—to follow him around in a pack and report slight variations on exactly the same story, which happens to almost always be the one the White House wants covered that day.

Wouldn’t it be a better use of resources to leave that sort of rote reporting to the wire services—or perhaps an intern, or even a stenographer or two—and let the reporters loose to actually find stuff out? Among the many problems with today’s mainstream media reporting is the incessant focus on surface matters, when what really matters is almost always what happens beneath the surface—where money changes hands and deals are made. Press releases and photo ops are designed more to conceal and confuse than to enlighten and uncover.

Consider, for instance, how many think-tank studies are released on any given topic and how frequently these reports are covered by journalists who are either incapable or uninterested in delving into the topic themselves to determine the quality of the research. Of course many think tanks are filled with first-rate scholars, former government officials, policy researchers, and the like, whose work is uncorrupted by the sources of their funding or the political interests of their top officers. I have worked for six such research organizations over the past 30 years—including this one—and I have almost never encountered such a problem. This is less true on the conservative side, however, because the right wing’s war on knowledge has forced it to create an infrastructure of organizations that support conservatives’ phony claims lest the real data undermine its ignorant—or perhaps deliberately dishonest—arguments.

According to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity, our elected representatives working on behalf of those who fund their campaigns have gamed the tax code. Wealthy donors are allowed to fund think tanks and organizations that fill our political discourse with false information in order to improve the donors’ own profits and protect their own wealth. According to the report, this is happening both at the local and the federal level, and it all goes down in secret.

At the state level, the report notes, beginning in 2009, “A network of online media outlets began popping up in state capitals across the nation, each covering the news from a clearly conservative point of view.” As for where the resources for these websites came from—particularly at a moment when most news organizations were going through an agonizing series of budget cuts—that was never clear. But thanks, belatedly, to IRS records, we now know that right-wing conservative foundations and individuals created an organization called “Donors Trust” as a pass-through to fund these online outlets without leaving any individual fingerprints. It gave away $86 million in 2011 alone—and all of it was “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,” according to the group’s website.

Since its founding in 1999, the Center for Public Integrity calculates that Donors Trust and its affiliated organization, Donors Capital Fund, have contributed nearly $400 million to a variety of allegedly independent—but actually conservative—groups, while simultaneously protecting them from being associated with the likes of such givers as the billionaire right-wing ideologue Charles Koch and his brother David. Other such Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund sponsors include Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, and owner of the Examiner newspapers and The Weekly Standard magazine Philip Anschutz, along with right-wing foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation, according to IRS records.

The money from these and other donors goes not only to small state-oriented think tanks but also to major Washington players, including the Cato Institute, which was funded by the Koch brothers’ funds, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Hudson Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Discovery Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. American Enterprise Institute’s president, Arthur C. Brooks, is on the board of Donors Trust. As conservative commentator and former American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum observes, these groups “increasingly function as public relations agencies” rather than genuine policy research organizations.

Of particular interest to right-wing funders—particularly energy-based billionaires such as the Koch brothers and their associated foundation—is the concerted effort by conservative think tanks to undermine the global scientific consensus that man-made global warming exists. These organizations have worked tirelessly to prevent governments, particularly our own, from addressing climate change because their major donors don’t want the oil and gas industry to go anywhere, lose any money, or forgo any of its various fiscal advantages and tax breaks that have come from it being a special interest over the years. Overall, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund have financed 102 organizations, which, in the words of The Guardian’s George Minibot:

… Either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. … These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama’s cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they’re seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.

And yet these smaller organizations and think tanks are doing so not only with oftentimes tax-deductible funds but also due to the funders’ anonymity—virtually without any connection to the people and corporations paying to undermine our climate security—meaning they’re not being held accountable for their manipulation of the news. As Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, explained to The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg:

The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It’s also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing. … There is no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them.

Recall the fact that not a single question about global warming came up during all four presidential and vice presidential debates in 2012. Much of the public remains deeply confused about the nature and significance of climate change, particularly as it relates to natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy—to say nothing of the likely rise in the earth’s temperature in the future. Meanwhile, members of the mainstream are in an uproar about just what President Obama and Tiger talked about on the ninth green.

What is wrong with this picture?

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Ted Nugent listens as President Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address on February 12, 2013.

Perhaps liberals ought to send Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) flowers and a box of chocolates. The Texas Republican—who recently threatened President Barack Obama with impeachment should the president use his executive power to strengthen the nation’s gun control laws—escorted Ted Nugent to President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night. If anyone wished to create a more perfect depiction of just how disconnected—not merely from reality but perhaps even from civilization as well—the modern conservative movement appears to be, what better symbol than the presence of Nugent? Here’s a man who has said:

• “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
• “Our president, attorney general, vice president, Hillary Clinton. They’re criminals … get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration … we need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.”
• While toting a machine gun: “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun … hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.”

Nugent has occasionally been visited by law enforcement officials for his inflammatory remarks, and was even barred from performing at Fort Knox for some particularly incendiary comments on the president.

Meanwhile, speaking in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden tried to explain that the right-wing reports alleging that the president sought to take Americans’ guns away was a “bunch of malarkey,” and added, “To be very blunt with you, we’re counting on all of you, the legitimate news media, to cover these discussions.”

Good luck with that, Mr. Vice President. The sad truth is that this nonsense is introduced into the media ecosystem by right-wing reality-denying sources, and it almost always makes its way into the mainstream media—often going unchallenged. Take, for example, Ted Nugent himself. Why in the world, while previewing a report on—you guessed it—Nugent’s views on firearms, would CNN’s Deb Feyerick claim that this violent lunatic enjoyed “a very deep connection with the facts and the facts that he needs to make his argument”? In the first place, it’s a logically nonsensical statement.

More importantly, however, it is patently false. There are said to be as many as 80 million guns in private hands in this country. Nobody could take them away, even if they wanted to—and as Vice President Biden tried to explain, nobody does. Yet just three days after Feyerick made herself look foolish in the service of Nugent’s nuttiness, during a February 4 segment on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront,” both Feyerick and Burnett went even deeper into the weeds, wondering aloud what would happen if the Obama administration attempted to “take all the guns away tomorrow.”

Predictably, following the president’s State of the Union address this week, it was absolutely crucial for mainstream media reporters such as The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Hughes to cover Nugent’s “thoughtful” response—as he was surrounded by competing journalists: “You just can’t get more of a predictable flowery script … and every time he is done speaking, he either does just the opposite or nothing at all.” To be fair to Hughes, he wasn’t the only one scribbling away furiously. Look at all this coverage of Nugent’s remarks and appearance. Those journalists’ mothers must be awfully proud.

Of course, covering the wit and wisdom of a hate-filled miscreant such as Ted Nugent is merely the tip of a dirty-media iceberg. The conservative media is filled with false notions, defamatory statements, racism, and conspiracy theories—all of which and more strain credulity to even fathom that anyone could believe them.

Among the most recent of a multitude of examples—and the most outlandish of the right-wing conspiracy theories afoot, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall notes—is the contention of ex-FBI agent and anti-Islam activist John Guandolo regarding CIA director nominee John Brennan. Apparently, “Guandolo left the FBI after sleeping with a witness in the investigation of disgraced Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana,” and then proceeded to go on Tom Trento’s radio show to make the claim that Brennan “did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia.” Moreover, according to Guandolo, “[Brennan’s] conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him.” We’ll see if that one shows up on CNN, as well.

In addition to the purposeful mindlessness of alleged news outlets such as CNN, a second problem that the dwindling number of sane conservatives face in reigning in the loud voices representing their movement has been the refusal of most conservative intellectuals to respond responsibly. One of the few conservative voices showing genuine concern for this tendency is the blogger Conor Friedersdorf. Writing recently on The Atlantic‘s website, Friedersdorf took to task Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative magazine National Review. He criticizes Lowry for cozying up to Rush Limbaugh—whom Friedersdorf understandably sees as helping drive the conservative movement off the deep end of illogic, to say nothing of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other intellectual sins.

Friedersdorf argues that, “National Review‘s editor ought to be an intellectual leader of movement conservatism, using his position to offer something different than the populist entertainers on talk radio and cable news”—owing to the fact that an “ideological coalition cannot flourish when a man like Rush Limbaugh is its thought leader.” Why, then, Friedersdorf asks, is Lowry claiming in his recent Politico column that “Rush Was Right”? What exactly was Rush so right about with regard to the president? It could be any of the following—all are claims that Limbaugh has made of late:

• “Barack Obama is trying—to dismantle, brick by brick, the American Dream. … this is what we have as a president: a radical ideologue, a ruthless politician who despises the country and the way it was founded and the way in which it became great. He hates it.”
• “Obama is telling us he is a black American first and an American second.”
• “In Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,’ and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white.”
• “When I look at Obama, I don’t see black. I see a socialist. I see a Marxist. I see a guy who’s got this country in his crosshairs.”
• “As far as Obama is concerned, the original flaw of slavery still exists, and this is what he and Bill Ayers are busy trying to teach as many young people in America as possible.”

Such statements—and the thousands of others like them—are part and parcel of what Paul Krugman calls “The Ignorance Caucus,” made up of people such as Limbaugh and Nugent, who are clearly hostile to knowledge and truth. The problem is that the members of this caucus are not remotely radical in the context of the contemporary conservative movement. This tendency toward illogical thinking is all-too-perfectly illustrated by the members of the Texas Republican Party, who in 2012, explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills” because such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

You can see this distaste for truth and facts almost everywhere that conservatives are now finding their views under attack. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), for example, called in a speech last week for an end to federal funding of social science research. Rep. Cantor isn’t the only one who wants to eliminate what he doesn’t support—House Republicans have made intense efforts to suppress any research they don’t like or agree with, whether it’s about gun violence, comparative effectiveness research regarding health care treatments, global warming, or a recent Congressional Research Service report that undermined conservative arguments about the value of cutting tax cuts for the wealthy. And what of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who charged at an Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday that—I kid you not—former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), President Obama’s nominee to be the next secretary of defense, is on the payrolls of North Korea’s paranoid totalitarian regime.

As with the likes of Nugent, Limbaugh, Guandolo, and other conservative thought leaders, it’s hard to believe that anyone—including the speakers themselves—can pretend to believe such outrageous allegations. But they just keep coming.

Ironically, the only conservative as of late who appears to be worried about the tendency of conservatives to say crazy things is Karl Rove. It’s not that he’s worried about the quality of their arguments or the honesty of their beliefs. Rather, Rove and his fellow moneymen are worried that these nutty folk will make losing candidates in looming elections. Rove’s new group, the Conservative Victory Project, is now involved in a delicate and sensitive undertaking to “impose a new sense of discipline on the party, particularly in primary races,” according to a recent New York Times article.

Steven J. Law, president of Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, is heading up the new project because, as he told the Times, “There is broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected.” Rove and his cronies are particularly worried that Iowan conservatives will pick as their Senate candidate in 2014 Rep. Steve King, a particularly wacky wordsmith who compares undocumented immigrants to dogs and Capitol Hill maintenance workers to “Stasi troops” because they were switching the building’s old light bulbs to more environmentally friendly ones.

Perhaps in the future, we can at least look forward to only seeing on the ballot those conservatives who are just crazy enough to pass Karl Rove’s muster. I wonder if Ted Nugent has any electoral plans.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/David Zalubowski

A couple sits on chairs in a near-empty room to watch Fox News commentator Karl Rove on a big-screen television during a Republican Party election night gathering in the club level of Sports Authority Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado, on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

Not a day goes by lately that Fox News does not itself make news. In the past few days, we’ve learned that the station dropped longtime commentator and pollster Dick Morris from its team of analysts. This comes after the decisions to renew the station’s lucrative contract with analyst Karl Rove and pass on the even more lucrative one with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

If these moves have a whiff of desperation about them, well, that’s appropriate. The station’s primetime ratings recently reached their lowest point in 12 years among viewers ages 25 to 54—who happen to be the only ones most advertisers care to reach. January was the worst showing ever for Fox’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” who viewers know as a close friend and confidante of Gov. Palin. On top of that, Fox News has hit a record low of trustworthiness among most Americans, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling (the 2012 election’s most accurate pollsters).

What’s more, a number of key Fox personalities are talking openly about jumping ship. Journalist Geraldo Rivera, for example, is teasing New Jersey voters about the fun they might have should he throw his hat into the ring for the 2014 Senate contest. And contributor Keith Ablow put out a press release announcing that he would run for the Massachusetts Senate seat left open by now-Secretary of State John Kerry if “all the leaders of the [Republican] Party united around” him.

Not too many people appear to be taking Ablow seriously, but the Rivera announcement—as ridiculous as it may be—has caught the attention of numerous journalism scholars and critics. David Zurawik, media critic at The Baltimore Sun, explained:

When I first saw this, the thing that really concerns me again is not so much Geraldo doing this, but I am surprised that Fox News is letting itself be used this way. … it is really, honestly one of the most troubling [things], really wrong that Fox allows itself to play this political role the way it did with [Rick] Santorum and with [Newt] Gingrich, to go on as long as they did into those primaries and be on the air. These guys have benefited enormously from being on Fox and having access to that large and active political audience they have.

Come on now. Zurawik’s “surprise” over Rivera expressed in his first sentence is belied by the evidence he offers in his second one. Fox has never been a “news” network—to be considered a traditional “news” source, it would have to be unbiased, which is a quality that Fox clearly lacks. This became painfully evident to its viewers last election night. Not only was the network totally unprepared for the “shock” that everyone who took the polls and the math seriously had expected—that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) got creamed—but viewers were also privy to an on-air battle waged by analyst Karl Rove to try to prevent the station from telling its viewers the truth about the election results.

Rove, as perhaps most but not all viewers were aware, used Fox (and The Wall Street Journal) as an adjunct to his primary gig, which was the raising and distribution of literally tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates in last year’s election through his super PACs. Indeed, he was in the news this week because he says his super PAC of multimillionaires and billionaires dubbed “American Crossroads” plans to have an even bigger role in determining which candidates get the nod in 2014.

So by calling Ohio—and therefore the election—for President Barack Obama, Fox was threatening Rove’s investments in the Senate candidates he and his cronies had funded. Many voters do not bother to show up—or remain in line—to vote if they believe the presidential race has already been decided.

If Fox were a “news” station rather than a political organization, why would it employ almost all of the potential Republican presidential candidates before the 2012 election and allow them to raise money for other Republican candidates? Why would the station’s on-air personalities be using it to launch Republican primary campaigns? Why would it constantly invite people on its various shows to advance the fantasy that President Obama was born in Kenya or that man-made global warming is a secret scientific conspiracy? Indeed, almost everything is part of a secret conspiracy, according to Fox—from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent illness to President Obama’s affection for skeet shooting.

The list of such examples goes on and on, but the lesson for all self-respecting journalists is clearer than ever: Stay away from Fox. It is in a different business than we are, and it’s not one that is compatible with truth-telling or traditional journalistic ethics of any kind. Alas, the opposite lesson appears to be the one that many conservatives prefer to believe—that those of us who believe journalists ought to at least try to tell the truth “without fear or favor” have, in actuality, been picking on the poor folks at Fox News. Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers, for example, makes the possibly clinically insane complaint that, “There is no war on terror for the Obama White House, but there is one on Fox News. … alas, the president loves to whine about the media meanies at Fox News. To him, these are not people trying to do their jobs. No, they are out to get him.” Oh, the humanity. She goes on and on, apparently unaware that the “job” of the people at Fox News, as defined by their bosses, is “to get” President Obama. (And if she is unaware of this, perhaps it is because, for some reason, she has not gotten the memo instructing Fox News personalities to say whatever is necessary—true or not—to try to prejudice viewers against the president.)

Of course, Powers at least has the excuse of being paid for her full-throated ignorance (to put the myriad problems with her analysis perhaps overly generously). But what is Howard Kurtz’s excuse? He is the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” but for years he has been willing to demean his credibility with repeated heartfelt defenses of Fox News president Roger Ailes, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News itself. Most recently, he attacked not only the White House but also former Vice President Al Gore for their willingness to point out the problems that the typical Fox News correspondent has with telling the truth. Much akin to the Fox-flack Powers, Kurtz equates a desire to see and hear responsible reporting as “whining.” He seems to think that because the president commands “an army, a navy and a bunch of nuclear weapons, not to mention an ability to command the airwaves at a moment’s notice,” the quality of our public discourse—and the lies that are routinely introduced by Murdoch’s minions—should not concern the president. Neither, apparently, should the fact that Republicans are routinely punished on Fox for even thinking about bipartisan compromise for the good of the country. (Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) fear of just that is one of the subjects of a New Yorker investigation of the politics of energy policy by a real reporter, Ryan Lizza.)

In yet another illogical non sequitur, Kurtz went off on Vice President Gore for selling his Current TV channel to Al Jazeera because Kurtz sees an “obvious contradiction of a climate change crusader selling to a network largely financed by the petrodollar kingdom of Qatar.” Note that Kurtz does not mention whether the station’s climate coverage is any good, nor does he mention that the station he’s defending routinely misleads its viewers about the very same topic.

How ironic, moreover, that the object of Kurtz’s affection, Fox News, is owned by News Corp, whose second-largest holder of voting stock happens to be Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal—a nephew of the Saudi king—who has a rather large interest in the continued use of fossil fuels. And never mind that, according to Gore, Al Jazeera’s “climate coverage has been far more extensive and high-quality.”

I can’t speak to Al Jazeera’s reporting on the issue because my cable provider, Time Warner, refuses to carry it. I also can’t speak to Kurtz’s personal motivations to make himself look ridiculous by not even bothering to check before mocking it.

I don’t, however, see a conspiracy. But then again, I’m not paid by Fox News. And I don’t want to be—I work in a different business than it does. Any so-called objective reporters out there would do well to realize the same and act accordingly. The likes of Kirsten Powers and Howard Kurtz will call it “whining.” A better name for it, however, would be journalism.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Fredrik Persson

Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for 2008, holds his Nobel lecture at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week with show co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, as well as Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) to discuss the deficit. The five of them spent more than 20 minutes on the issue—quite an achievement for a cable news program—and Krugman found himself quadruple-teamed the entire time.

Krugman argued that America’s long-term deficit is not the problem that America’s political class insists it is, especially with regard to Medicare and Medicaid. Far more significant, he argued, is the challenge of “job creation,” which is currently thwarting our economic recovery from reaching millions of middle-class Americans who continue to suffer the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s not that Krugman opposed efforts to reduce the debt per se. Rather, he explained, “I’d like to see us paying down the debt but not at the cost depressing the economy right now.” Regarding Medicare and Medicaid, he added that, “Health care costs have slowed a lot lately,” and that the long-term financing problems facing these programs—as America ages, and more and more people depend on them—might not appear as critical when the time comes to deal with them.

All of the other participants in the discussion objected to his arguments, but none were able to elaborate. Speaking of the extension of Bush tax cuts, Scarborough opined, “It seems like we’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the economy,” without much success. His view appeared to be that there was really no point in trying to do more—but, to be fair, it’s not clear whether he had any point at all.

Haass said he thought the economy could be stimulated through “immigration, free trade, change the corporate tax rate”—all favorites of corporate lobbyists but questionable as to their ability to create jobs. There was also much talk of “Simpson-Bowles”—the deficit reduction plan put forth by the president’s bipartisan fiscal commission, co-chaired by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles—though Krugman pointed out that not even all of the members of that commission had endorsed the plan’s recommendations.

(Recall, as political writer Alex Pareene did, that at the 2012 Republican National Convention, Republican vice-presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) “opened his acceptance speech by nonsensically blaming the president for a plant closing that happened before he took office and went on to blast Obama for failing to support a ‘centrist’ deficit-reduction proposal that Ryan himself had personally torpedoed in the House of Representatives.” Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used the same tactic during the first presidential debate.)

Brzezinski made the point that ignoring the debt was akin to ignoring climate change, but Krugman explained that this was “a really bad analogy,” given the fact that every year we are significantly increasing horrific effects of greenhouse gases—effects that cannot be reversed—while, in fact, our fiscal problems may very well improve over time. He went on to say that, in any case, the fiscal issues facing our nation are a second-order problem when compared to the cost that careless cuts in social and entitlement spending could do to our fragile economic recovery.

Given the lack of substance with which Krugman’s arguments were met, one would have concluded that the four members of Scarborough’s panel were overmatched in their discussion. Krugman had facts, figures, and a deep understanding of economic theory, evidenced by his many decades of practice as both an economics professor and a government advisor, including a post as senior international economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under former President Ronald Reagan, and his Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences. These are just a few of the many reasons The Economist labeled him “the most celebrated economist of his generation.”

His critics, in the discussion, could not compete. And while one might be sympathetic to the difficulty that most people have in calling up complicated facts and economic theories on the spot—especially when faced with a bevy of television cameras—one cannot help but be depressed by Scarborough’s next day follow-up on Politico comically titled “Paul Krugman vs. the World.”

According to Scarborough, in the face of Krugman’s arguments, “maintaining calm was not … easy for Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, who agrees with former Joint Chief chairman Michael Mullen, that long-term debt poses the greatest threat to America’s national security.” They both agree, moreover, with “former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles … that entitlements and debt are the most pressing challenges we face as a country over the next few decades.”

Scarborough also notes:

You can add my liberal co-host, Mika Brzezinski, to that group. Mika let out a gasp when Mr. Krugman suggested Medicare and Medicaid shortfalls should be ignored. She compared Krugman’s “head-in-the-sand” approach to the one taken by climate change deniers.

Krugman’s response to Brzezinski, noted above, inspired a “spirited email from former Treasury official and ‘Morning Joe’ regular Steve Rattner in defense of Mika’s analogy.”

What Scarborough fails to note in this follow-up is that none of the people he mentions above are economists, much less economists even close to Krugman’s stature. Indeed, it’s hard to see what training or expertise that a talk-show host feels qualified him or her to argue at all, “liberal” or not. The two people Scarborough cited with direct experience in economic policy in government—Erskine Bowles and Steven Rattner—are also deeply connected to the worlds of banking and corporate finance, both of which are interested in keeping profits where they are rather than tackling job losses, purchasing power, and housing security experienced by the middle class in recent decades via Keynesian intervention in the economy. In other words, they are operating on the basis of ideology—one that may be widely shared by the corporate-funded political elite in Washington, but not one that has demonstrated itself to be helpful to the hundreds of millions of Americans who have failed to see much in the way of benefits since our economic recovery began in 2009.

As Katrina vanden Heuvel pointed out in The Washington Post:

More than 20 million people are in need of full-time work—and single women, minorities and the young have fared the worst. Wages are sinking. The top 1 percent captured fully 93 percent of the nation’s income growth coming out of the Great Recession in 2010. The young find good jobs scarce, even as they carry record student loan debts, now higher than credit card debt.

In a reply to Scarborough on his New York Times blog, Krugman employed the term “incestuous amplification,” which, as he writes, happens “when a closed group of people repeat the same things to each other—and when accepting the group’s preconceptions itself becomes a necessary ticket to being in the in-group.” As to Scarborough’s belief that he and his friends have “the world” on their side, Krugman counters:

As Joe Weisenthal points out, the reality is that among those who have expressed views very similar to mine are the chief economist of Goldman Sachs; the former Treasury secretary and head of the National Economic Council; the former deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve; and the economics editor of the Financial Times.

In a better world, the people in charge of making policy would examine the evidence—and the qualifications of those making the arguments based on such evidence—and allow the best alternative to emerge. Alas, that is not the world in which we live. Instead, as Krugman accurately notes, “all the Very Serious People have committed their reputations so thoroughly to the official doctrine that they almost literally can’t hear any contrary evidence.”

This is hardly a new phenomenon. We saw it, as Krugman notes, in the run-up to America’s disastrous war in Iraq. And we saw it more recently—and sadly, all too similarly—in Scarborough’s recent pre-election attack on statistician and election forecaster Nate Silver. In that case, as in this one, he ignored all the evidence that lay behind Silver’s deeply detailed mathematical calculations with the casual, uninformed attacks on Silver such as: “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.” Sadly, it requires less a degree of knowledge about any given political issue than a feel for political fashions in insider Washington and the media.

Alas, the joke is almost certainly on us. Krugman may be the man with the facts and the evidence on his side, but he is not, to borrow a phrase from President Reagan, the guy who paid for the microphone.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/David Zalubowski

A couple watches Fox News commentator Karl Rove on a big-screen television during a Republican Party election night gathering on November 6, 2012.

When literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, he meant it as a lament. He noted that while some conservative opposition to liberal thought did exist, its proponents remained inarticulate and could “express themselves” only through “irritable mental gestures.” He also wrote of the fear that liberalism would grow flat and flaccid without a worthy intellectual sparring partner to keep it fresh.

Liberals today face an even graver situation, as conservatism threatens to run off the rails of reality entirely, and liberalism is thus once again in danger of having no real intellectual opposition to force internal questioning or truth seeking about what works and what does not in the present political era.

Contemporary American conservatism faces a slew of problems that Trilling would recognize as its adherents seek to reimagine and retool their movement in light of its unmistakable repudiation in the 2012 presidential election. But, as anyone who watched Fox News’s election coverage would likely agree, among the biggest obstacles facing conservatism is its inability to recognize reality for what it is. Nobody looked more shocked by President Barack Obama’s victory that night than Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and the rest of the folks at Fox News—even when the results were just what polls had predicted.

Conservatives hold outlooks ranging from denying the fact that guns are murderous weapons to ignoring the threat posed by man-made global warming to discounting the dangers posed to our democracy from economic inequality. Holding just one of these positions in the face of the avalanche of evidence against them is remarkable. But to hold to all of them is something even more curious and demands an explanation.

The key to it, I believe, is conservatives’ ability to continue insisting on the existence of an alleged liberal media conspiracy to keep the truth not only from them but also from all Americans. After all, if the only places conservatives can get their news bias-free are sources committed to their own cause, there is no need to face up to “reality” as such. It’s an endless loop of victimization and self-justification—an argument stating that what the rest of us view as the “real world” plays next to no role in their calculations, political or otherwise.

In a recent Forbes article titled “Is America’s Future Progressive?“, the author, Joel Kotkin, predicted—rather optimistically from a right-wing perspective—that:

The class issue so cleverly exploited by the president in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism [because the] Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows. If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade.

Kotkin’s final economic claims might be true, but it’s odd to blame progressives for this when it has been those on the right who have stymied all efforts to try to improve the situation. But leave that aside for a moment. Here’s the sentence that makes one’s eyes widen: “And then, the Republicans, ham handed themselves, are virtually voiceless (outside of the Murdoch empire) in the mainstream national media.”

“Virtually voiceless.” Yes, you read that right. According to Kotkin and Forbes, CNN does not now and has never offered viewers the voices of previous conservative commentators such as Erick Erikson, Lanny Davis, David Frum, Dana Loeesh, Ari Fleischer, Susan Molinari, Mary Matalin, Amy Holmes, William Bennett, Margaret Hoover, Rich Galen, David Gergen, Nancy Pfotenhauer, Alex Castellanos, Leslie Sanchez, S.E. Cupp, Kevin Madden, Marsha Blackburn. (Full disclosure: I got that list from Wikipedia. I don’t watch enough CNN to know if they are all actually still working there.)

Perhaps Kotkin doesn’t consider them to be conservatives. Perhaps, then, MSNBC does not broadcast Joe Scarborough for 15 hours a week, who is often joined by former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele (to say nothing of Karl Rove acolyte Mark Halperin). And has anyone picked up a copy of The Washington Post lately? Notice that Charles Krathammer, George Will, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Robert Samuelson, Robert Kagan, Mike Thiessen, and Kathleen Parker all have regularly published columns, along with Chuck Lane, Dana Milbank, and Ruth Marcus often taking up the Republican cause—if only to bash liberals.

What about David Brooks and Ross Douthat at The New York Times (and Brooks regularly appearing on PBS and NPR—those bastions of liberal thought—as well)? What about Jonah Goldberg at The Los Angeles Times? Ever read Newsweek/The Daily Beast? Surely you must have noticed, say, Mark McKinnon, Meghan McCain, Megan McCardle, David Frum, Eli Lake, Niall Ferguson, Michael Medved, and even Howard Kurtz playing ball more often than not. Isn’t that George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Matthew Dowd on ABC News pretty much every week? Is Condoleezza Rice not on CBS News as a contributor? Yes, the Rice appointment came after the article by Kotkin was published, but still, which major mainstream media outlet does not employ conservatives to regularly give voice to Republican points of view?

The notion that Republicans are “virtually voiceless” is evidence of a point of view so divorced from reality, one barely knows what to say in response. In fact, according to many studies, Republican voices continue to dominate the mainstream media discourse, especially on the influential Sunday morning broadcasts.

Of course it’s possible, even likely, that Kotkin and Forbes are not as crazy as all that. Perhaps they have taken to heart Rich Bond, then-chair of the Republican Party who in 1992 outlined the right’s game plan, saying that, “There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

A golden oldie to be sure, but what could be more conservative than sticking with what works? Too bad it requires these same media outlets to divorce themselves from reality merely to accommodate these voices, and thereby give the impression that, as Stephen Colbert likes to say, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

I know I’ve used these quotes before. I fear I’ll have to use them again in the future, too. Don’t blame me. Blame the “virtually voiceless,” and, oh yes, the “refs.”

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/ Mike Mergen

Glenn Beck is among a number of right-wing radio hosts being paid by different organizations to promote their ideas.

Journalism has often been called “the first draft of history,” but oftentimes its addiction to surface-level examination of “the facts” obscures deeper, more important truths that citizens need to know in order to make sense of a story, regardless of what number draft it may be. This is particularly true of politics, where all too often statements of principle are taken at face value as if the speaker had no interests save personal altruism.

Principle, of course, is rarely the whole story. But it is even more rarely the case within the political right in Washington these days, as lobbyists and other moneyed interests have taken over the conservative movement and have refused to draw a line between their own personal enrichment and the policies they profess for the rest of us.

Case in point: Conservative organizer Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, is almost always portrayed in the media as an extremely effective ideologue. He has recently become famous for his 1986 “Taxpayer Protection Pledge”—which bars its signatories from voting for any form of tax increase presented to them in Congress—a pledge that more than 95 percent of current Republican legislators in Congress have signed. It’s true that Norquist is a genuine antitax ideologue, but as a recent report by Lee Fang in The Nation notes, “Though Norquist claims to protect all tax credits, he seems to devote a great deal of his attention to some groups rather than others.” It turns out the taxes to which Norquist’s foundation devotes a great deal more effort to fighting are taxes that affect his major donors.

As Fang notes, energy subsidies, for example, are a topic of special interest on the Americans for Tax Reform website, and the foundation argues for billions of dollars of credits to oil and gas companies. To remove these generous subsidies to some of the most profitable industries on the planet, the group argues, would be to stick a “tax hike on energy producers and families.” Alas, between 2008 and 2011, an investigation by The Nation found that the American Petroleum Institute—a trade association for oil and gas companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil—gave $525,000 to Norquist’s group.

Thomas Frank explored some of these dealings in his 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew. As a young man, working through a nonprofit called the United States of America Foundation, Norquist, together with his comrades in College Republicans, would raise big bucks from corporations in order to fight efforts by campus Public Interest Research Groups to improve the lot of consumers. Ditto from polluters in order to oppose campus-based environmental groups. Later, in 1997, Norquist started his own lobbying firm, Janus-Merritt Strategies, which boasted Fannie Mae as a client, among others.

Later, during the late 1990s, after Microsoft hosted members of Americans for Tax Reform for a luxurious three-day retreat in Redmond, Washington, the foundation returned to Washington, D.C. and immediately sent a letter to House Republicans urging them to make deep cuts in the funds available to the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which happened to be pursuing Microsoft at the time. Norquist was paid $40,000 as a lobbyist for the company. As Fang notes:

The pattern repeats itself like clockwork. When Philip Morris paid Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist campaigned against cigarette taxes. When a cellphone lobbying group paid Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist campaigned against cellphone taxes.

And then, of course, there is Norquist’s involvement with the criminal activities of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and company. Among the many nefarious activities growing out of that operation, Fang notes, was the Mississippi Choctaw tribe’s (one of Abramoff’s clients) transfer of $1.2 million through Americans for Tax Reform for other Abramoff plots and plans. Norquist’s cut? $50,000 from two of the transfers.

Yet such behavior is apparently business as usual on the right. Take, for instance, the recently formed group called Fix the Debt. The group has been agitating ceaselessly for cuts in entitlement spending for middle-class Americans as if motivated exclusively by its members’ concern for the fiscal health of the nation. Alas, as Nicholas Confessore reported in The New York Times, many of these same members stand to profit handsomely should their agenda be enacted.

Jim McCrery, a former Louisiana congressman, is one of the group’s spokespeople. He is also a lobbyist with Capitol Counsel LLC, whose clients are the likes of the Alliance for Savings and Investment, which the Times describes as “a group of large companies pushing to maintain low tax rates on dividend income.” He also represents the Win America Campaign, which the Times describes as “a coalition of multinational corporations that lobbied for a one-time ‘repatriation holiday’ allowing them to move offshore profits back home without paying taxes.”

McCrery is hardly unusual, however, among the group’s leaders. Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, is a member of Fix the Debt’s steering committee. Coincidentally, he received more than $300,000 in 2011 as a member of the General Electric Board of Directors. (McCrery is a GE lobbyist) As Confessore notes, General Electric “is among the most aggressive in the country at minimizing its tax obligations.”

The Fix the Debt board and steering committee members also enjoy numerous ties to members of the finance industry. Erskine B. Bowles, one of the group’s co-founders, took home $345,000 in stock and cash in 2011, thanks to his position on the Morgan Stanley board, while former Gov. Judd Gregg (R-NH), co-chair of the group, is a paid advisor to Goldman Sachs. Both companies, Confessore observes, have engaged in lobbying on international tax rules. Gregg also sits on the boards of Honeywell and IntercontinentalExchange, which netted him nearly $750,000 in cash and stock in 2011 and is opposing tax on financial transactions that would likely lower its profits.

Again, such ties are not unusual within Fix the Debt, nor groups like it. In this case, almost half the members of its board and steering committee enjoy lucrative associations with companies looking to lower taxes and spending and preserve the special treatment that many of their industries enjoy.

Media Matters recently alerted the public to another form of cash transfers pretending to be ideological principle. In this case, owing to the weird armed standoff involving former Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) and the conservative nonprofit organization FreedomWorks, the former complained that the organization was “spending too damn much” and “getting too little value out of it,” regarding the big bucks flowing to talk show host Glenn Beck, among others. Internal FreedomWorks documents reveal that Beck took about $850,000 (exclusive of third-party event ticket sales) from the organization. As Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters, points out:

Payola is most often associated with hit radio stations and the long-standing tradition of music industry middlemen known as indies funneling record company money to radio stations in exchange for on-air spins for new singles. But the fact is, the payola statute in America makes it a crime for radio stations to receive anything of value, like record company promotional payments, if they fail to disclose that relationship with listeners.

Groups such as FreedomWorks and the Heritage Foundation, however, have been paying off these right-wing radio hosts to tout their ideas for years, while listeners are kept in the dark. According to Politico, in exchange for the donations made to far-right radio shows, the groups’ agendas were weaved into the daily programming. “The relationships,” as Media Matters adds, “seemed to be built on deception”:

“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts,” said the leader of [a conservative] group who inquired about ads on various radio shows, but decided they were both too expensive and ethically suspect. “If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.”

A bad taste in the mouth of taxpayers is about the best that the suckers who buy these beliefs as honest commentary can hope for; that is, unless more journalists take a cue from those above and devote some time and energy to getting the story behind the story and exposing contemporary conservatism for the self-interested shell game it so regularly appears to be.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: Flickr/drmikeevans

David Barton is the author of The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.

The number of Americans who call themselves members of the Tea Party is down to just 8 percent, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. This is just one-third of the number of Americans who claimed membership in April 2010, shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Twenty-four percent was never a very high number, particularly given the breathless press coverage the movement inspired. This is, after all, a country where the majority rules. But the decline to 8 percent—a far smaller percentage of Americans than even those who claim to believe in UFOs—is entirely predictable in hindsight, considering just how much nonsense one had to believe in order to take seriously the absurdities that Tea Party leaders spouted. The movement’s leaders spewed so many simultaneous falsehoods and contradictions that it was a full-time job merely to try and track them.

Among the most recent trees to fall in the forest of Tea Party fiction is the work of alleged “historian” David Barton. His most recent book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, alleges to “correct the distorted image of a once-beloved founding father” and insists that America’s third president was an orthodox Christian who did not believe that church and state should be separated. Barton attempts to argue that America’s founders hoped to create a Biblically inspired theocracy, rather than the increasingly democratic republic that most of us studied in grammar school. According to Barton, the United States was founded not by secular-minded Deists but instead by evangelical Christians eager to erase the line between church and state so that they could lay the foundation for a Christian nation.

Last July, however, the History News Network named The Jefferson Lies the “least credible history book in print” before the conservative Christian publisher Thomas Nelson announced it was ending the book’s publication and withdrawing it from circulation.

It’s a shame the publisher did not bother to familiarize itself with Barton’s resume before publishing the book. Barton once claimed, for instance, that he had uncovered a document authored by former President James Madison revealing that the nation’s political institutions had been founded on the Ten Commandments. Alas, nobody else—including nobody at the University of Virginia, where Madison’s papers are housed—can replicate this feat of discovery.

Barton also seems to have a problem with counting. He argues in his book, for example, that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was saved by the power of prayer. “While neglecting God, [the delegates’] efforts had been characterised by frustration and selfishness,” but “only after returning God to their deliberations were they effective in their efforts to frame a new government.” Alas, the suggestion to pray was made by none other than Benjamin Franklin. Apparently Barton did not read any further, however, because the convention actually voted against the idea: The prayer recommendation garnered the support of only three or four delegates.

Nevertheless, The Jefferson Lies drew praise from Tea Party champions, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who called the book “wonderful” and “most useful,” and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), who gushed, “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message.” Conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck, who wrote the book’s introduction and has called Barton “the most important man in America right now,” has decided to pick up the discredited work and publish it himself. Barton said the new version, published by Beck’s publishing company Mercury, “will not include any substantive changes, but I will rephrase some things to remove any potential confusion.”

More serious academic historians, even among conservative evangelicals, find no comfort in the mythology Barton and his promoters are peddling. “Books like that [make] Christian scholarship look bad,” argued Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical professor of psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. “If that’s what people are passing off as Christian scholarship, there are claims in there that are easily proved false.” In fact, Throckmorton and his colleague, Michael Coulter, were so disturbed by The Jefferson Lies that they decided to author a response in the form of a book titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President.

Unfortunately, the Barton saga is all too typical of the Tea Party ethos—one that many in the mainstream media have frequently given a free pass. (Consider the fact that CNN, which considers itself to be an unbiased news source, co-sponsored a Republican debate with the organization—all but inviting a conservative rewrite of history whenever convenient.) Remember that the person the Tea Party movement picked to represent it nationally in opposition to President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), insisted that the famous “shot heard around the world in Lexington and Concord,” credited with beginning the American Revolution, was fired in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts. She was also under the impression that “the very founders that wrote” the U.S. Constitution “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States,” even though they agreed to extend it. Furthermore, she credited something she called the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff,” allegedly passed by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with responsibility for the Great Depression, despite the facts that the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff  was actually passed under Republican President Herbert Hoover and that the Great Depression was already in full swing when President Roosevelt assumed office in the spring of 1933.

Of course, the modern conservative movement has long evidenced a stubborn disdain not merely for honest history but also for knowledge itself. In a previous column on this topic, I noted that conservatives sought to kill off the Office of Technology Assessment, whose purpose from 1972 to 1995 was to provide Congress with objective analyses of complex scientific and technical issues, as well as the American Community Survey—a crucial aspect of government data collection that has existed in various manifestations since 1850—because, as we all know, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

That “bias” revealed itself yet again this week when we learned from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, that 2012 was the hottest year ever in the history of the United States. While 97 percent of credentialed climate scientists concur that global warming is both extremely dangerous and caused by human activity, global warming, according to climatologist Bachmann, is “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.” And conservative politicians who are willing not only to embrace the scientists’ conclusions but also to begin to discuss what’s necessary to address them are about as rare as right-wing folk singers.

But hey, don’t worry. I’m sure it will all turn out alright. Just as long as David Barton gets to write the history.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Sandra Fluke introduces President Barack Obama at a campaign event in Denver, Wednesday, August 8, 2012. Fluke is a Georgetown law student who inadvertently gained notoriety when talk show host Rush Limbaugh spoke disparagingly of her testimony before Congress on the issue of contraception and insurance coverage.

In keeping with the list-making mania of this time of year, Politico’s Dylan Byers made his own list of the “Top 10 media stories of 2012.” Because Politico has, almost by popular acclimation, become the most influential publication that covers—some might say that “over-covers”—the ins and outs of insider politics in Washington, it strikes me as a useful exercise to examine the underlying assumptions determining what makes a story “important” in the mind of a Washington insider. After all, it certainly doesn’t appear to be a story’s implications for policymaking or even its informed discussion of the issues that determine its value and ranking on Byers’s list. Still, a story’s designation as “important” does offer a window into what drives the coverage of Washington politics—and, if only by extension, policy itself.

Here are Byers’s choices of the past year’s top 10 stories, followed by what I hope are insightful explanatory comments of my own. Coming in at number…

10. John King invites the wrath of Gingrich

“CNN’s John King opened January’s Republican primary debate in Charleston, S.C. pledging to stay out of the way,” notes Byers. But he failed to do so by asking Newt Gingrich to respond to his ex-wife’s accusation that he had asked her for an open marriage. Gingrich, according to Byers, “responded with a fierce attack that saved his own reputation—he would go on to win the South Carolina primary—while dealing a considerable blow to the moderator.”

Gingrich Press Secretary R.C. Hammond claimed King’s question was an example of the “gotcha journalism” routinely employed by the mainstream media. Gingrich himself added that, “I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. I’m appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.”

But ask yourself: Why in the world does this exchange between King and Gingrich qualify as a top story of 2012?

In a more sensible country—or even a sensible political party—Gingrich might have had a point, but in this case, all he had was a great deal of chutzpah. While it’s true that a candidate’s love life has no bearing on the kind of president he or she might be, we live in a country where politics has become a tributary of the entertainment industry, and as such, we feel entitled to eavesdrop on the love lives of the stars. Moreover, Byers does not mention that Gingrich famously attacked President Bill Clinton for his adulterous activities while partaking in some of his own as House Speaker. As the Clinton impeachment episode demonstrated, and virtually every 2012 Republican presidential candidate agreed, the private lives of presidential candidates became fair game for the media and for other candidates long ago.

Finally, for all the success ascribed by Byers to Gingrich’s attack, nowhere was King accused of inaccuracies. Once again we see conservatives attacking journalists for reporting on what they themselves have previously raised as an issue. But this flap did not matter a whit as far as who was going to be America’s next president. Newt Gingrich was never going to be president or nominee or anything like that. His entire campaign, similar to those of most of the GOP presidential hopefuls—particularly Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann—was just a media-fueled ego trip.

9. Brian Ross’s Tea Party error

“ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross came under fire for the umpteenth time,” Byers notes, “after he reported that the suspect in the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting in July may have had connections to the tea party.” This claim, as it turned out, was erroneous.

One gets the distinct impression that either Byers (or his editors) must really have it in for Ross or they wish to demonstrate some extra special love for the Tea Party, because this is hardly one of the single most egregious inaccuracies of the year. What’s more, a relatively quick apology was issued for the misstatement. Yet Byers goes on to write that, “The episode not only added to Ross’s reputation as a reporter prone toward spectacular errors, it became a black mark for the network.”

In fact, a more significant error regarding the reporting of the Tea Party was the consistent overestimation of the popularity of its policy positions, to say nothing of their coherence—or, more accurately, their lack thereof. This was something that the mainstream media missed consistently, no outlet more so than Politico itself.

8. PBS capitalizes on Mitt Romney’s ‘Big Bird’ remark

We all remember when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney invoked Big Bird during the first presidential debate, saying that, “I like PBS. I like Big Bird. I like you too,” he told PBS’s Jim Lehrer at the October debate in Denver. As Byers quickly points out, however, “[I]t was PBS that decided to seize on the remark and turn it into a promotional opportunity” with a series of statements and a media tour by Paula Kerger, its president and chief executive officer. President Barack Obama’s campaign then picked it up, too. Byers thinks that this “actually raised awareness and rekindled debates about the future of federal funding for public broadcasting.”

But, seriously, so what? So the candidates wasted their own and everyone else’s time discussing an issue that, according to its own reporting, constitutes about .00014 percent of the federal budget. Why in the world does Politico think this story is important, much less one of the top 10 media moments of the year? Heck if I know.

7. The celebrity of Nate Silver

Byers beats the drums awfully loudly here, claiming the following:

In 2012, no single media personality became a bigger antidote to liberal fears of a Romney victory than New York Times statistician Nate Silver. While reporters and pundits across the spectrum spent the final month of the campaign calling the race a coin toss, Silver’s projections, based primarily on his carefully curated aggregation of polling data, increasingly favored President Obama.

Furthermore, Byers sees in Silver’s defense of his method an apparently nefarious purpose: the promotion of his book, The Signal and the Noise. Byers goes on to note that, “The entertainment industry courted him for box-office analysis and public speaking gigs; he was feted at parties in New York and Los Angeles; President Obama even cracked a joke about him while pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey.”

Interestingly, Byers does not find room to mention that he was a vehicle for the know-nothing conservative attacks on Silver. Taking a bizarre swipe at what he called “the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis.” in an article titled “Nate Silver: One-term celebrity?” he reported that, “More than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.” Byers never did explain what the flaws might be in Silver’s methods—nor what was so offensive about “NPR types.” Instead he chose to equate Silver’s deeply detailed mathematical calculations with the casual, uninformed attacks on Silver by the likes of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough—who insisted, without positing any evidence, that, “‘Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.’” When Silver’s predictions proved almost flawless on Election Day, it became clear where the true joke lay.

6. Roger Ailes tries to enlist Gen. Petraeus

Byers notes that in early December:

Bob Woodward revealed that Fox News president Roger Ailes had tried to recruit Gen. David Petraeus to run for president in the 2012 elections, offering a clear-cut and intriguing example of a media player trying to influence the political process. Had Petraeus jumped in to the race, Woodward reported, Ailes would have considered resigning as head of Fox to run the campaign while Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corp, which owns Fox News, may have even chipped in some of his money.

Byers is right; this was indeed a big story. And give him credit for being right about why. True: Byers assertion that, “Woodward’s report was met with a collective shrug. Even Woodward’s Washington Post, which published the exclusive, relegated the story to its ‘Style’ section.” Even truer: Byers’s assertion that, “Had it been the president of any other news outlet, it would almost certainly have been a front-page story resulting perhaps in the end of a career due to the crossing of the observer-participant ethical line in journalism.” But we all know that Fox has no interest in such lines, as it is not really a news station—that, however, is something else entirely. The real question is why much of the time most members of the media pretend that Fox is a “real” news organization.

5. CNN, Fox News bungle the Obamacare ruling

“Throughout the year,” Byers notes, “there have been countless examples of news organizations falling on their face as they raced to break news milliseconds before the competition. But none was so memorable as CNN and Fox News’s bungled reports on the Supreme Court’s health care ruling in June, which epitomized how the media’s obsession with being first could come at the price of factual accuracy.” He notes that while CNN apologized and corrected its error, Fox News, which made the same mistake, “issued no such statement.”

Byers makes a good point regarding Fox. The real question here, however, is what makes reporting the news a few seconds sooner than the next guy so critical that reporters can’t be bothered to read the actual document upon which they are allegedly reporting? Journalism has always seen speed as being in conflict with accuracy, but when was it decided that the latter should be thrown under a bus in tribute to the former? And who made this decision? Certainly, it couldn’t have been the audience. Its members would have been happy to wait, say, 10 minutes in the service of being given true information about the health care law ruling.

4. Candy Crowley fact checks Mitt Romney

“CNN’s Candy Crowley inadvertently stole the spotlight at the second presidential debate,” according to Byers, “when she challenged Mitt Romney’s assertion about President Obama’s handling of the security situation at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.” This was an unexpected move that drew fierce accusations of bias from Gov. Romney’s supporters. Byers adds that, “Like her colleague John King in South Carolina, Crowley quickly became the subject of the next day’s news cycle as footage of the exchange played throughout the night as Romney surrogates moved to work the refs.” He then goes on to quote those same refs as if they were credible sources: “‘She was wrong!’ Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told reporters in the spin room after the debate. ‘Candy Crowley had no business trying to fact-check in real time, because she was incorrect,’ Romney surrogate and former Gov. John Sununu told Fox News.” Weirder still, Byers insists that, “even Crowley seemed to acknowledge that she had erred.”

I have to admit, I don’t understand at all what Byers and Politico are trying to say here. That Crowley was wrong even though she was right? Is the argument using that infamous weasel word—“seemed”—to argue that Crowley acknowledged this? This is shameful nonsense. Crowley was correct; Gov. Romney was wrong. The real issue here is whether politicians should be allowed to lie at will without journalists having the right to inform their audience that a lie is a lie. Gov. Romney’s supporters were so used to most journalists playing the role of loyal transmission belts for their fibs that they forgot that not all of them were willing to play the game this way.

3. The rise of MSNBC

Byers thinks that 2012 “was the year that MSNBC cemented itself as the left’s answer to Fox News,” as it became “must-watch television for liberals around the country.” In insisting so, however, he ignores the following crucial point: Fox lies, and MSNBC doesn’t. I have no problem with opinionated news—or, one might argue, contextualized news, which is what I do here—but that is an important distinction between the two stations. MSNBC broadcasts 15—count ‘em, 15—hours weekly of the conservative former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough, who, in the final moments of the 2012 election, became an increasingly unhinged Gov. Romney partisan. Tell me, how is that anything like Fox?

2. Karl Rove’s on-air meltdown

Byers writes, “The discord between fantasy and reality reached its climax on election night when Karl Rove repeatedly challenged Fox News after they called Ohio—the state that would decide the election—for President Obama, forcing Megyn Kelly to walk down a hallway in an awkward moment on live television to the Fox ‘decision desk’ where they explained their methodology on-air and informed her, once again, that Obama had won.”

True as far as it goes, but what Byers fails to note is that Rove’s conniption fit may have had something to do with all the down-ballot Rove-funded candidates he was hoping could be saved if Republican voters thought there might still be a chance for their main man. Rove may be evil, but he’s not stupid. And he’s not a journalist. Which, come to think of it, is another issue about Fox.

1. Sandra Fluke and Rush Limbaugh

According to Byers, “No single media story was as highly charged as the face-off between conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who he called a ‘slut’ after she testified about birth control.”

A “face-off?” Really? When the world’s most famous radio host attacks, in virtually the most vulgar terms imaginable, a young woman who is merely testifying on behalf of public policy, I would humbly suggest that perhaps “drive-by shooting” would be a better metaphor. Then again, the media, especially the Politico-influenced media, sure do love conflict, and they would prefer to play up the personality angle of any story at the expense of the substance that lays behind it. Limbaugh argued that any woman whose health care plan provided birth control should be forced to provide pornographic videos of her sexual activities for his amusement. Is there a single better example of how low—whether morally, intellectually, or politically—conservatives have fallen in the Obama era? Can you find in any other story a more dogged commitment to the need of journalists to create a false equivalence between the two sides?

I know the above Top 10 list may be depressing, but it is, fortunately, only temporary—at least in its specifics. After all, remember when Sarah Palin ruled Politico’s world? What the heck ever happened to her?

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.