The ABCs of Iraq Injuries

"Abramoff's clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP -- exactly the reverse pattern."

Which partially prompts Paul Krugman to ask:

"Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.

"More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff's web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform."

You wait -- someone will interpret this as bad for Hillary:

"It's starting to look as if Geena Davis will be a one-term President," says People , reporting that "Commander-in-Chief" is going on hiatus in March.

LAT blogger Michael Hiltzik wonders why conservative bloggers are ignoring a big story:

"While the absolute chaos associated with the Medicare drug program's rollout has made the front pages of newspapers across the country, inspiring governors of more than two dozen states to undertake emergency action, the right-wing blogosphere has scarcely printed one word about the program. Thousands, possibly millions of American citizens have been hurt, many of them in life-threatening ways. Patients, doctors, and pharmacists are outraged. State governments are committing tens of millions of dollars to bail out the feds.

"Yet, from the right: Silence . . .

"As a classic welfare/entitlement program with its cultural roots in the New Deal, Medicare has hardly been the apple of the right's eye. Indeed, the epic and humiliating arm-twisting that was needed to get the drug program passed by the GOP-controlled House in 2003 amply demonstrates that conservatives were uneasy about this program from the start. Nor was the right blogosphere so shy about commenting on the Katrina disaster.

"But there, I think, lies the key. As incompetent as FEMA was on that occasion, a handful of Democratic office-holders were skulking conveniently nearby to absorb some of the blame -- or, if you believe the right, ALL the blame.

"But no Mayor Nagin or Gov. Blanco is available as a target for finger-pointing here. Bush demanded the program, a Republican Congress passed it over Democratic objections, and a Medicare bureaucracy eviscerated by the Bush White House put it into action. Like the Abramoff thing, this is a Republican scandal down to its bones."

I mentioned the other day a forthcoming book by Daily Kos man Markos Moulitsas and picked up from the Washington Monthly that he periodically chats up Democratic leaders. Well, the magazine's Benjamin Wallace-Wells has posted a lengthy correction online that includes this:

"My story states that Moulitsas speaks frequently and regularly with DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. In fact, he speaks regularly with their staffs, never with Emanuel, and only very occasionally with Reid."

Jack Shafer doesn't think much of Ted Koppel's "self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television news" in his NYT debut. I didn't think it was bad, myself. How else would we have known that Koppel has an unfinished novel?

Shafer's substantive critique: "When Koppel laments the fact that cable, satellite, and broadband have 'overcrowded' the marketplace, making it 'increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic' -- that is, readers and viewers deciding what they want to consume rather than what the three broadcast networks think they should -- he sounds like any other monopolist complaining about how the arrival of competition has dragged down quality."

The new Wonkette has debuted--um, a work in progress--but what's with the same caricature of a gal when the blog is now written by two guys?

Finally, here's the day's most interesting feature, on my former Post colleague Martha Sherrill giving up a big advance to write a memoir of her father -- because of a secret that emerged which she won't reveal -- and turning it into a novel instead. Kind of the anti-James Frye, but without the Oprah appearance.