Message: Stay Home!

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006 8:32 AM

Well, our secret is out.

Someone must have leaked the confidential plan.

It was diabolically clever, I must say. We MSM types, after meeting in a parking garage, decided that our best hope for handing this election to the Democrats is to suppress Republican turnout .

Bwahahahahaha.

You see, it's not that we care about the carnage in Iraq, or members of Congress cyberstalking teenage pages. We just want Republicans to stay home, thus ensuring Democratic control of Congress and the continued dominance of the liberal-media worldview.

Brilliant, don't you think? And it might have succeeded if only some traitor hadn't given us up.

I don't know how this became the new Republican talking point. I mean, I'm all for criticizing the media for, say, overplaying the Foley scandal or running too many polls-say-Democrats-will-win stories. But what journalist even thinks about convincing voters to stay home?

Yet there was the star of "Hannity & the Other Guy" on Friday--the same Sean Hannity who is campaigning for Republican Michael Steele today in the Maryland Senate race--declaring that "the media seems somewhat complicit. I argue that there's even sort of an institutionalized bias to sort of suppress voting and take away initiative from people -- that's how I feel -- based on the news coverage."

Okayyy. And now comes Fred Barnes , executive editor of the Weekly Standard, to say:

"As for Republican efforts to spur a big turnout on November 7, the press frowns on such cheap tactics. 'GOP Aims to Scare Up Big Voter Turnout' was the headline on a Washington Post story last week.

"If you suspect there are forces eager to suppress Republican turnout, you are right. Rarely has the press echoed Democratic themes as relentlessly as it has in the closing weeks of the 2006 campaign. And the main theme is that Republicans are about to be blown away. The question now is whether this message will persuade Republican voters to stay home on Election Day. It shouldn't, so long as Republicans--and especially conservative Republicans--act like adults, not like petulant children angry over one thing or another that didn't go their way."

Barnes has actually worked in newsrooms, including the Baltimore Sun and Washington Star. I respect the arguments he makes, even when I disagree with him. So it's hard for me to buy that he believes reporters would actually scheme to do this.

Freddy goes on to say: "Yes, the Republican performance in the last two years has been disappointing. The Iraq war isn't going well. President Bush and the Republican Congress have spent too much of the taxpayer's money. They got nowhere on overhauling Social Security and only part of the way--beefed-up border security--on immigration reform. The list goes on. Still, the reasons given for staying home on Election Day are pathetically disconnected from the realities of politics and political power.

"The president and Republicans need to be taught a lesson: We hear that a lot from conservatives. And maybe Bush and company do. But allowing Democrats to take over Congress won't achieve that. It won't lead to a Republican course correction any more than losing the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections taught Democrats to move to the right. Politics doesn't work that way, and it never has. Losing simply hurts a political party. A landslide loss in 2006 would merely weaken the Republican party."

Other conservatives, meanwhile, continue jumping off the Iraq bandwagon. National Review's Jonah Goldberg is the latest. He doesn't bury the lead:

"The Iraq wa[r] was a mistake.

"I know, I know. But I've never said it before. And I don't enjoy saying it now. I'm sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that's fine because I'm not joining their ranks anyway.In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests).

"I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known -- or what was believed to have been known -- in 2003. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing."

Jonah says Iraqis should vote on the continued presence of U.S. troops:

"If Iraqis voted 'stay,' we'd have a mandate to do what's necessary to win, and our ideals would be reaffirmed. If they voted 'go,' our values would also be reaffirmed, and we could leave with honor." Although the place would still be a bloody mess.

A non-conservative, blogger Jeff Jarvis , does his own mea culpa:

"I had separated intent of the war from its execution. In 2003, I believed the intent was proper. I followed a path that Tom Friedman has since abandoned if not recanted: that this war was not and should not have been about WMDs but was instead about bringing freedom, democracy, and opportunity to a part of the world whose primary export is becoming anger. Not unlike Peter Beinart, I saw a liberal justification to the war: antitotalitarianism, freeing people from tyranny, supporting freedom and choice, as well as coming to rescue the people we had abandoned in the first Iraq war and its aftermath. I saw a humanitarian cause.

"But the execution, I saw too late after our "victory," was hopeless and shameful. And, of course, it has only gotten worse as it has gotten more stubborn...

"So which do I regret? The war or its execution? I fear it doesn't matter anymore. Wishing and what-iffing that things had been done differently does no good for the people who have lost their lives there."

Yet another poll with bad news for the Republicans: "Two weeks before midterm elections, Republicans are losing the battle for independent voters, who now strongly favor Democrats on the major issues facing the country and overwhelmingly prefer to see them take over the House in November, according to a new Washington Post -ABC News poll."

And, wait, here's one more, from USA Today : "Just 19% of those surveyed say the United States is winning in Iraq, an all-time low. And 38% say their own member of Congress doesn't deserve re-election, an all-time high."

You might think the public editor of the New York Times would get a little credit from the right for admitting error and saying he now opposes his paper's decision to publish that controversial story on administration surveillance of banking records. You would be wrong. And his reference to "vicious criticism" of the paper really set off the bloggers.

"Un. Freaking. Believable," says Michelle Malkin . "The NYTimes ombudsman, Byron Calame, buried a bombshell mea culpa in his column--reversing his prior defense of the Times' blabbermouth report on a once-secret terrorist banking data surveillance program and now admitting the paper was wrong to publish it . . .

"You and every other Chicken Little, anti-Bush editor at the Times who put lives at risk and undermined counterterrorism operations by giving your bogus justifications 'too much weight.' . . .

"Stop making excuses. It's Bush hatred that led to the reckless publication of the story."

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit is, if anything, even more acerbic:

"Oh, horse manure. You let your ingrained hatred of everything not nakedly leftist - including the Bush administration - govern your thoughts and actions, as do almost all employees of the Times.

"This is an especially telling admission from the Times 'ombudsman,' who, in theory at least, is supposed to be the most objective journalist in the Times organization. But a 'vicious criticism' (what? did GWB forget to call you the world's greatest newspaper?) is enough to warp your objectivity enough to print a story that did major damage to the safety . . . of the United States?

"You people are pathetic."

Looking for one paragraph on why the GOP should lose next month? Andrew Sullivan sums it up:

"If the Republicans lose this election, it will be for a simple reason. They have forgotten what conservatism means. You cannot spend and borrow more than any Democratic Congress since FDR and remain a credible conservative. You cannot elevate executive power permanently above individual liberty and remain a credible conservative. You cannot wage a war without the care, resources, and troops needed to win and remain a credible conservative. You cannot wage a religiously-based culture war and remain a limited government conservative. It's not that complicated really."

Slate columnist Jack Shafer has accused me of essentially threatening, "Don't cut this newsroom budget or I'll shoot this investigative reporter!" That wasn't quite the point of yesterday's column , but here is Shafer's take . He likens my argument to cities threatening to close firehouses when faced with budget cuts:

"Journalists play a similar game whenever the bean counters order layoffs or buyouts in the face of tumbling or stagnating revenues: They equate the loss of warm bodies in the newsroom with the end of civilization. For instance, in a Sept. 16 piece, L.A. Times' Tim Rutten warns that budget cuts at his paper ordered by its owners will injure democracy and the public interest. In a Sept. 30 follow-up, he bemoans the damage done to Los Angeles Times stakeholders (readers, the city, the state, the West, Latin America, and the entire Pacific Rim) for the benefit of the Tribune stockholders who own the paper. In today's (Oct. 23) Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz calls the press the "the first line of defense against public corruption" and writes that the 'corporate slashing' by news organizations will 'mean fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.'

"I rough up Rutten and Kurtz not because they're chowderheads. They're among the best in the journalism biz. But they speak for most in their craft when they somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good. If there is a profession that doesn't think it's essential to the steady rotation of the planet around the sun, I've never heard of it. (A couple of years ago, a Harvard political scientist got so carried away with waving the flag for special interests that he declared that bowling leagues were vital to the commonweal, and their decline a tragedy.) . . .

"The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market. For instance, Tribune critics denounce it for cutting the foreign bureaus at the Baltimore Sun and Newsday, which it owns. But should every metropolitan newspaper keep its Moscow or Jerusalem bureaus when readers can click to Web coverage from the New York Times and the international press, especially when many of those papers are losing circulation? Something's got to give."

First of all (harrumph), I agree that some places are overstaffed, not all layoffs are bad, we all have to adjust to the digital age, yadda yadda yadda. But I'm simply trying to make the point that a) journalists have done some great work this year exposing corruption; b) when newsrooms cut staff by 20 percent, fewer people have to do more work to get the paper out, and that hurts investigative reporting. Not just special SWAT team yearlong projects, but the kind of enterprise reporting that a beat writer can do if he or she doesn't have to file every day.

Blogger David Roberts is steamed at CBS:

"The mainstream media has a bead on the blogosphere. They've got their story.

"'The blogs' is now short-hand for 'conspiricists, wackos, and (worst of all) partisans.' If a nightly news producer needs something slightly outre said, something outside the orbit of polite political dialogue, 'the blogs' are happy to say it for them. There are, after all, a lot of blog posts. They're bound to say anything."

Hmmm: Doesn't Katie have a blog?

"This makes the media lazy. Exhibit A: CBS [Evening] News did a story on the widespread belief that Bush & Rove are manipulating gas prices in advance of the mid-term elections. We're told the blogs are fairly abuzz with suspicion.

"For this, they mustered two blog screenshots:

"A random one-paragraph Daily Kos diary on 'gas prices and the elections.'

"A post of mine arguing that Bush and Rove are not manipulating gas prices, and couldn't if they wanted to.

"So much for that story. Did they just run a google search on 'gas prices' and screencap the results?

"Whoever's producing CBS News doesn't seem to grasp that 'the blogs' are not some undifferentiated goo to spread on stories for spice. The salient features of the blogosphere are its diversity and depth. Perhaps that explains why it's so alien to nightly news producers. Where the nightly news puts a homogenizing sheen on every 2 minute clip, blogs and blog posts vary wildly in length, tone, erudition, evidentiary support, and uses of the term 'wanker.' "

The Beeb is biased? Says who? Oh. BBC officials themselves, says the Daily Mail :

"It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

"A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

"It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar' wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

"At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians."

That's a whole lot of anti-.

"One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.' "

Just when you thought everything possible had been thrown at Hillary Clinton:

"Hillary Clinton's Republican challenger is getting personal and it's not pretty: He says the senator used to be ugly - and speculates she got "millions of dollars" in plastic surgery," says New York's Daily News .

" 'You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew,' said John Spencer of Clinton's younger days. 'I don't know why Bill married her,' he said of the Clintons, who celebrated their 31st anniversary this month.

"Noting Hillary Clinton looks much different now, he chalked it up to 'millions of dollars' of 'work' - plastic surgery."

" 'She looks good now,' he said."

Very generous of him. That ought to help with the women's vote.