The Dish

Good for George Stephanopoulos. Giuliani tries to weasel his way out of it. In defense of ABC News, its own Jake Tapper pressed Giuliani and beat his colleague to the punch. Which is a sign of a healthy news organization. Now when will Mike Allen take responsibility for his Cheney p.r. duties?

A National Journal survey of GOP elites found little support for Palin. Nate Silver thinks that could be to her advantage:

[T]here's going to come a time, probably in July 2011 or so, where the knives are really drawn on Palin and Republican pundits, strategists and candidates start saying in public some of the things they've been thinking in private. And that in all likelihood will play very well for her. Although the Establishment's concerns about Palin's viability as a general election candidate are well grounded, mostly they're just terrified of her because she doesn't need them.

That's my point.

Pretty funny.

Just as Rudy Giuliani simply asserts that there were no terror attacks on the US under Bush, so Peggy Noonan gives us this view of Obama's first year. She argues that the only focus of Obama's attention was the health insurance reform bill which she says proves he is a leftist president, not a center-left president:

It was not worth it—not worth the town-hall uprisings and the

bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public's concerns and the administration's are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security…. [Obama] had frittered his attention on issues that were secondary and tertiary—climate change, health care—while al Qaeda moved, and the system stuttered.

So Obama put health insurance reform before the economy and national security. She writes this in a newspaper. She states this as fact. But it is not fact. It is patently false in every single respect.

The following is indisputable. Obama's first act was increasing national security by ending the torture program, and pledging to remove the biggest recruitment tool for our enemies: Gitmo. His second focus was a stimulus package, which, according to AEI, added four points to economic growth. His third focus – how soon they forget – was on rescuing the banks. Before health insurance reform passed, he initiated and completed and implemented a total overhaul of the Afghanistan war. He maintained rendition and the Bush time-table for Iraq withdrawal. He tried (and failed) to restart the Israel peace-process but was stymied by Netanyahu. His policy toward Iran has seen the regime more vulnerable than at any point in its history. His success at finding and killing many Qaeda operatives, his dispatch of Somali pirates, his intense focus on drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan: these are also simply facts of history.

And the health insurance reform has no public option, pledges to cut Medicare, and will reduce the deficit, according to the CBO. It brought 30 million new clients for the private drug and insurance companies. This is leftist.

Noonan's column is a fantasy, a dream, a weird incantation of a thesis that is merely how she feels, without any substantive relati0nship to reality. Well, at least she understand that the GOP is offering nothing – nothing – substantive as an alternative except oil drilling and torture and more bellicose rhetoric toward the rest of the world because that worked out so well under Bush.

Ackerman adds to the discussion:

[H]ere’s a refinement of the point that, I think, can soothe Kinsley’s irritations: modular journalism! Make just one specific point and leave, developing the story through hypertext and tag clouds. So here’s what I mean.

Check out this Los Angeles Times piece. It’s a good piece about Maj. Gen. Flynn’s intelligence overhaul in Afghanistan and corresponding CNAS paper. But then it’s also a piece about the Afghan parliament rejecting Hamid Karzai’s cabinet. And it’s also a piece about the first U.S. casualties in Afghanistan of the new year. That’s because newspapers that have contracted staff, and particularly foreign staff — like the Los Angeles Times – can rarely allot the space on the physical newsprint for three Afghanistan stories. So poor Julian Barnes and Laura King, being responsible for the edition’s Afghanistan coverage, have to shoehorn three (in this case) newsworthy Afghanistan developments into one piece, even though those developments are perfectly distinguishable.

EA relays the details:

[A] reported group of 200 around the home of Hojetoleslam Ghavami, where Karroubi was staying for a mourning ceremony, attacked the residence with stones and bricks. City officials and even the provincial governor tried to stop the assault but were unsuccessful. After four hours and the advice of “special forces” (possibly his State-appointed security detail) and anti-riot police, Karoubi decided to leave Qazvin for Tehran.

As the car was leaving the complex, shots were fired at it, breaking the supposedly bullet-proof windows. Karroubi said that there was not much his protection team could do; firing back in defence would have led to their prosecution. He added that only God knows why the guns that are supposed to be used only to defend the nation and the country are used against the people.

A reader writes:

The Corner post you linked to includes this quote from Going Rogue: "We laughed about it but knew that if I said it even once during the debate, it would be disastrous." Well, she did say it during the debate. It was worth a chuckle to those who caught it, but hardly qualified as disastrous. Typical sloppiness, exaggeration on Palin's part.

It actually qualifies as an "odd lie," but I'm going to be compassionate on this one.

Larison counters this reader:

Most revolutions do have specific goals and demands, most of the successful ones do have organized leadership that can mobilize at least a dedicated cadre of followers, and most have some idea what means they will need to exact the concessions they desire and have some idea of how to acquire these means. When revolutions fail, as they did across Europe in 1848, they failed because they were poorly organized, because they had an agenda that was either insufficiently developed or insufficiently attractive to a broad cross-section of society, and because they had no means by which they were going to take power.

Hassi-Messaoud, Algeria, 2.22 pm

Bonus sandstorm shot, after the jump:

There is something in what Rudy said this morning that makes some sense to me:

“If you put someone in a civilian court, within a short period of time a lawyer is appointed and the person shuts up. If you have a person in the military system you can question him endlessly for as long as you have to make sure you have gotten the full scope of information.”

And this is the tragedy of what the Bush administration did. By adding torture and abuse to what can be done during interrogation to terror suspects, by having no regard for future convictions and no real care in determining who might have been captured by mistake, and by rigging military tribunals to ensure guilty verdicts in advance, the Cheney goons destroyed their own argument. But even on those grounds, the fact that Cheney and Bush tried Richard Reid in a civilian court as Obama has the undie-bomber renders Giuliani’s otherwise fair point moot in this case. Let me also point out that Stephanopoulos did not challenge the untruth that Guantanamo Bay is a more humane detention center than domestic criminal ones (and thereby Giuliani’s view that closing it was “totally absurd”); he did not challenge the untruth that Bush’s military tribunals were generally deemed fair (they absolutely weren’t); he didn’t point out that the Red Cross deemed prisoner treatment at Gitmo as unequivocally torture; he did not insist that Giuliani explain why he has switched his position on civilian trials from Reid to the undie-bomber (merely referring to Bush’s own position); and ended the interview summarizing the GOP talking points.

He also, of course, did not challenge the most absurd claim by Giuliani in the whole interview: that there were no terror incidents on Bush’s watch. He wasn’t a total push-over, and did not simply cave on everything. But as an act of journalism, it was not his finest hour. Perhaps realizing his biggest howler, he hurriedly wrote a blog-post with the fighting words:

Giuliani seems to have forgotten about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and shoe bomber Richard Reid.

How do you sit in front of someone who says 9/11 didn’t happen under Bush and say nothing?

In all this, Stephanopoulos was much more a handmaiden to Giuliani’s p.r. than a journalist. And the chit-chatty bonhomie between the two, the cozy friendliness, the constant laughs and grins and cheeriness is what the MSM has become so good at. It’s all too often about rich, powerful celebrities using other rich, powerful celebrities for a synergy of media and political self-advancement. And in the morning, the last thing you want for ratings is a tough or uncomfortable challenge of a leading politician. You can hear the producers now: keep it light, keep it warm, don’t make them switch channels with some kind of conflict.

The result? Giuliani ate Stephanopoulos for breakfast.