Operation Board Games

I imagine George W. Bush and Sarah Palin fueled many delusions among D-list politicians who assumed corruption, ignorance, incompetence and flat-out stupidity are no longer barriers to political promotion, and frequently go unremarked by the political media.
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KT- as a personal favor, a holiday gift, if you will, can you ask John McCain to comment on the fact that Joe the Plumber found him “appalling”. It must have been a terrible blow to Senator Straight Talk that his hero, his role model, holds him in such low regard.

Screw the Feds, Blago has faith in those wonderful people out there in the dark.

“A possible run for President in 2016?”
Never know-what year did Nixon say we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore after losing in California? 1962?

I never thought I’d say this: We have found an elected official who makes Palin look smart.

KT here–

I like the motivational speaker idea, too.

Hmmm,
A corrupt Governeror with delusions of grandeur and ambitions for National Office and a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease?
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Does anyone else have a sense of Deja Vu?

KT, I had a question for you in the MS last thread. It started with SGW doing a google search:
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“Oh and all of those journos that Scherer says were miffed about Bush dodging blame about Valerie plame…
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A google search reveals
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Results 1 – 10 of about 230,000 for George Bush Valerie Plame
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Results 1 – 10 of about 331,000 for Barack Obama Rod Blagojevich
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I responded: sgw – those Google stats are astonishing. In a little more than 24 hours there have been more mentions of this issue than years of bush and plame.
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In one of the posts yesterday I predicted that there would be more pundit tongues wagged and msm ink spilt over this false issue than all of the real Bush scandals. Appears I may have been right.
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If KT, the real journalist, is watching this thread, I wonder how she feels about this?
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Hey, you’re supposed to be on vacation!

I know I’m over doing this, but I can’t resist. The parallels.
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State Sen. R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis: [after a subpoena for money records has been served] Because if some federal mothafucker comes walkin’ through the door, I say hey, it’s all in the game! But a city police, Baltimore City, Hell Naaaw, can’t be happenin’ because I know I done raised too much goddamn money for the Mayor and his ticket! Hell Naaaw, aint no soul in the world that fuckin’ ungrateful!
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Mayor Clarence V. Royce: Calm down Clay
[Davis interrupts]
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State Sen. R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis: Money Launderin’ they gonna come talk to me about Money Launderin’ in West Baltimore, SHIIIIT, Where do you think I’m gonna raise cash for the whole damn ticket! From Laundromats and shit, from some tiny ass korean groceries, you think I got time to ask a man why he given me money or where he gets his money from, I’ll take any mothafucker’s money if he given it away!
Mayor Clarence V. Royce: I don’t wanna know.

State Sen. R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis: I know you don’t wanna know, but Im scratchin’ and clawin’ to get it done for you Clarence, for you and me and the rest of the team and who comes through my door but a Baltimore City police lookin’ to get up in my shit about everything!
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Mayor Clarence V. Royce: [Trying to reassure Davis] We didn’t know about this!
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State Sen. R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis: I’m sorry I gots to get up outta here before I lose my damn mind
Mayor Clarence V. Royce: Nobody knew about this!
State Sen. R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis: [Leaving the Mayor's office] You wanna run a campaign with my money pillowed under your ass, you need yo people to back the fuck up Clarence!
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KT here–

wv: I am on vacation, but I’m down in Texas at my parents’ house and they aren’t nearly interested enough in all of this.

wvng, when you’re worried about your paycheck, you keep your mouth shut. She won’t answer.

It’s been making me laugh all day imagining Blagojevich thinking hard on ways to outsmart Fitzgerald. I can’t stop chuckling. I picture him calling with great new brainiac ideas as his lawyer says, “Great idea, Blago!” while calculating the fee and leafing through Mercedes brochures. “That’s a winner, Big B!”

Blago was just following the career path McCain laid out. Now he repents for a decade and everyone loves him in the end.

cincy, please give KT a break. She is in a tricky spot. Of course, I keep putting her there, don’t I.
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KT, do you find it remarkable that there have been more news stories in 24 hours regarding utterly baseless speculative innuendo about Obama than there have been about Bush in years about a solidly based story in which the Bush administration outed, for political purposes, a CIA operative who was working on WMD proliferation in the Middle East?
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I do.

In a way, you gotta wonder if his misplaced sense of invincibility was somewhat rational. Tons of people are coming out calling Blag “delusional”, “a sociopath”, and “crazy” but keep in mind that this guy has been in politics for a long time and only finally is he finally getting arrested. Obviously, the pay-for-play situation isn’t just a recent development. This guy must have been doing this from his very early days, over and over again for 16 years, and getting more blatant about it as time went on. 16 years and all along he’s only been getting elected for higher office.

Blago: “Hey, it’s me again. Lightning strike! We say it was all a test as part of my reform platorm. I’m like, ‘Mr. Fitzgerald, you passed the test – with an A+++’ and then it’s over! I’ll be all, ‘Yay, we did it!’ No? What do you mean, ‘a stretch?’ Alright, I’ve got some other way better ideas I’m working on. I’ll cal you back.”

In fairness, not everything on the internet is permanent. There are likely a lot of current stories which are not destined to be archived a year down the road. The “Google Test” is probably not a good indicator of all coverage.
Again the two main contrasts between Blagogate and Plamegate is that the press were active players in the Plame affair and that unlike the situation Rove and Scooter, nobody’s leaping to the defense of the Illinois governor and complaining about how unfair and politically motivated Fitz must be.
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It’s really night and day.

in re: Google test: Obama and Blago were/are high ranking pols from the same state. Pretty much every Illinois state page, every Trib/Sun-Times (and a couple hundred papers around the state) story about politics, etc is going to return a hit.

No question though that, as Scherer and the NYT demonstrate in this matter, the bed-wetting fear of being accused of having a “liberal bias” has been internalized by political reporters. It’s called The Clinton Rules since that’s the most obvious and extreme case, but it’s much broader and more simply partisan than that.

Side note: Time alum Matt Cooper dismissively refers to the Plame affair as “a perjury case” in an otherwise pretty good HuffPo post today. Broderville never did grasp the significance of that case.

wvng, per your google results comment, you got to remember, that pages on the internet don’t last forever. There could have been more pages, but due to people not keeping old information around, they’ve been deleted…maybe not, but that’s what I would guess is the cause.
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Hey KT: everytime you think your out, they drag you back in, huh? Enjoy the vacation.

yogi
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Do you really think tons of pages about the Valerie Plame affair tying it to George Bush have dissappeared? We aren’t talking about something that happened 20 years ago you know. Its much more likely that they never existed to begin with

While no one will miss Blago but his mother, there’s hardly a peep about an Alabama governor sitting in prison most likely just because he belonged to the wrong party.

Gotta love the American media, bless their hearts. Especially MS.

Blago to Attorney: “Me again. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before: we say I have an evil twin brother – Iago Blagojevich – and blame everything on him! I can find some homeless person with poofy hair to take the rap. Fitz will never figure it out. Hit me back. I feel good about this one!”

Perhaps your right sgw, but I just don’t think information lasts on the internet as long as people like to believe. Webpages take money to keep running, people get tired of maintaining their back dated information, so stuff inevitably disappears…

“cincy, please give KT a break. She is in a tricky spot. Of course, I keep putting her there, don’t I.”
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I used to give her a break all the time wvng. However we seem to be on the brink of the Fall of the Roman Empire Part 2 and I have no desire to cut anyone any slack, especially not a member of our venerable 4th estate. I know being threatened w/ losing your job is a great motivator to keep one’s mouth shut, but if you want respect, you gotta earn it where I’m concerned.

I posted this link on another thread. It’s an interesting take on the haste with which Fitzgerald is operating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html?_r=1

…and she had me banned once.
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“Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense! Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist.”
(translation: sure theres smoke but come on people there’s no fire here. Move along.)
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/01/17/running_massacre/
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“What’s more, as far as anyone seems to know, Barack Obama has nothing to hide. He says he never talked to Gov. Blagojevich about any of this. So what’s up? ”
(translation: sure there’s no fire here, but mind if I roll up the windows and hot box these right wing talking points?)
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/12/10/the-ongoing-investigation-thing/

Cincy:

Gov. Blagojevich = OJ Simpson
Gov. Blagojevich = Marty Morninweg

Hey sgw, I change my position, I still hold that information in mass doesn’t last as long on the internet, but I agree with you that there was probably less written about Bush/Plame than Obama/Blagojevich because to a person who isn’t a news-o-phile like us who hang out on Time’s blogs, the Obama/Blagojevich story is really easy to understand, trying to get payments for a senate seat appointment. The reason Obama is in so many of those search results is because it was his seat, regardless of any relevancy Obama had about what was going on. While the Bush/Plame story is far more complicated to someone who hasn’t read much on it. The Bush/Plame story will probably go down as a footnote in the Iraq War story. This story remains to be seen, but I’d imagine it probably wont even be a footnote in the history of Obama’s presidency.

Andy, just posted this at the Incorrigible One’s other thread(warning: not NFL related):
Michael Scherer = the reporter who made up the homeless serial killer story on the last season of The Wire

yogi, the Blago story is less than 2 days old. A search with a date stamp returns this result:
168,000 for Barack Obama Rod Blagojevich December 2008
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This removes most of the miscellaneous dual references, so the count is now 168k Blago/Obama, 230k Bush/Plame. That is still obscene.
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the Bush/Plame story is far more complicated to someone who hasn’t read much on it. A covert agent who worked, no led, the CIA in WMD weapons proliferation in the Middle East was outed by her own government at a time when WMDs in the Middle East were considered the number one threat to our country. Not difficult at all.
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And the press didn’t care.

The press didn’t care because they were complicit. You didn’t expect them to rat out Judith Miller AND Matt Cooper AND Robert Novak did you?