Jun 19th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Endgame
TGIF, I guess; I really want a nap:
— What’s with TPM’s wall-to-wall John Ensign coverage?
— Office of Thrift Supervision not really dismantled.
— Centrist Senators (including Democrats) didn’t mind huge price tags when rich people were benefitting.
— Bad history meets warmongering in a new Michael Oren joint at TNR.
I’m pushing the idea that Faiz should be “Supreme Leader” of ThinkProgress instead of Editor in Chief. What do you think?
42 Responses to “Endgame”
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June 19th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Thank you for the Ensign question. I think TPM has decided to focus on its “core competency” in muckraking. I also suspect that they had some kind of a lead from the beginning of this story that they’re not acknowledging. But I’m not convinced that the story repays their effort, anyway. It’s an affair. Big deal.
I wish they would spend more time talking about things like the expansion of the (occasional) filibuster into a supermajority requirement for all legislation and appointments.
June 19th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Ted,
As people learned in Wtaergate it isn’t the crime it is the cover-up.
I think TPM is onto somthing here and this story could shed some light on the corrupt trainmgle of Republican Politicians connected-businesses and right wing media.
Check out what they are exploring: Ensign getting jobs for these people at various firms, The cuckold husband taking his story to FOX News, Ensign going public on his own, initially coming just short of accusing the guy of extortion, now backing off that claim. The question now seems to be why did Ensign go public now, did FOX News tip him off that the husband was spreading the story?
June 19th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for the Reality-based Community link. I said the same thing to a lot of people who insisted that the stimulus package was way too big.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I’m pushing the idea that Faiz should be “Supreme Leader” of ThinkProgress instead of Editor in Chief.
It depends on how literal you wanna be. Khamenei’s title is actually “Rahbare Enqelab” (lit. leader of the revolution), which doesn’t work for TP, no matter what the GOP says. I don’t remember the proper word for “supreme”, so I’d end up trying “Bazorg Rahbare” (big leader), or if I’m being coarse, “Bazorg Pishro”.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
According to wikipedia, “Supreme Leader” = “Rahbare Moazzam”
June 19th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Lonewacko’s late with his Endgame turd-dump.
He can shut the fuck up anyway.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Lonewacko fell off the face of the internet after those Minuteman buddies of his murdered that immigrant family in Texas.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Yeah, if you’re following TPM’s coverage, the sex aspect is really besides the point.
1) Where Republican party (or friends’) resources being used as part of a cover-up with all these jobs.
2) What’s Tom Coburn’s role. He was pretty clearly aware of some of this (which reinforces point one).
3) The Fox News angle, which appears to have precipitated Ensign’s self-outing, is particularly fishy (if unsurprising).
June 19th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Yeah, the TPM coverage of the Ensign affair stands, I think, in stark contrast to its coverage of the Abramoff affair. I recall that they used to do incisive analysis about central stories. Can’t really tell what they are doing anymore.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Michael Oren seems always to produce bad history + warmongerning. I was shocked to discover, when I looked at the bibliography of his book on America’s relationship with the Middle East, for instance, that he didn’t cite the work of any scholar working in languages other than English. Perhaps I should have looked more carefully, but I don’t think that I even found anything written in Hebrew. Just going by this bibliography, it doesn’t seem that he consulted Turkish, Persian or Arabic primary sources either (am I wrong here? Does primary source research appear within the text) If so, he is utterly utterly unworthy of the title historian.
And yes, his recent article for TNR is offensive nonsense.
Also, I am always shocked when I read the Spectator. A nasty right-wing rag which is a) both literate and b) funny. It is even sometimes accurate. That is something else American conservatives could learn from British conservatives.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
The “supreme” part means he comes with sour cream and tomatoes, right?
June 19th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
@2, and re: “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”
Yes, except that in the Ensign case there is a) no crime and b) no cover-up.
I hate GOP hypocrisy, and this is a good example of it. So I see that there is *some* story here. But I’m really not getting the point of the detailed timeline they’re trying to produce over at TPM. I don’t see how it makes much of a difference.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
That Oren article’s right up your alley, Matt. Time was you wouldn’t have let a gem like that slip away into the hands of Alex Massie, competent though he is at dispatching it.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/06/the_tangled_web_he_wove.php
Marshall explains himself pretty well here. Clearly he thinks there’s some much bigger, non-affair related boogeyman lurking in the shadows of this story, and he wants to be on top of it if there is. Could his Spidey-sense be wrong? Sure. Will he look silly if Ensign is just playing all these crazy games because of some broad he was banging? Of course. If it turns out that Ensign was crooked as hell and this is just tip of the iceberg, will he look like a genius? You’d better believe it.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Marshall explains himself pretty well here.
That post was written by David Kurtz.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Why did the cuckold take the story to Fox?
June 19th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Are you kidding me with the Josh Marshall snark Matt? A link to a lefty snob saying TPM is going “downmarket”? You missed the mark on this one my friend. The Ensign scandal is a genuine political story complete with lots of conservative hypocrisy.
June 19th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Ted,
He doubled the woman’s salary during the affair, he hired her 19 year old son to be a policy adviser to the RNSC; may not be technically illegal but the people donating to his campaign and the RNSC might have some questions about how their money was spent.
If he used his job status against the husband to intimidate him into not filing for divorce then there may be legal issues.
The details about the jobs his donors gave the husband haven’t come out yet, if therr was some kind of pay off going on a crime may have been committed.
And the story about why Ensign chose to make this all public hasn’t come out yet either.
If this were simply an issue of Ensign having an affair with some woman, yeah no story, but the employment stuff and potential misuse of campaign funds is a bigger deal.
June 19th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Oh, Matt. Don’t become a beltway ho. When moral monsters make a big doo-dee in the middle of the Senate floor, who are we not to take note? Ensign was one of the moral centurions flaying Clinton, and Craig, and on and on. Move on–nothing to see here, except for some desperado nepotism/blackmail and stinky hiring, making the GOP and sundry campaign contribs foot the bill. Really, Josh, whattup with that? It’s just like a gangsta rap video from Vegas…. No big deal in today’s happening DC.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I don’t think TPM will look silly for sniffing out a story that’s ultimately a relatively stock sex scandal. I mean, that’s what reporters do, right? Investigate stories? I’m especially curious about Ensign’s on-again-off-again-on-again affair with extortion allegations. That’s a pretty serious crime to be intermittently accusing someone of. This broke a couple of days ago. If he’s still covering it constantly a month from now with no significant developments, then there might be a complaint. Until then, this ombudsmanning up seems misplaced.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Is there some reason why the Dumbfuck Democrats are NOT pointing out that after Republicans SABOTAGED Health Care Reform in 1994, They did NOTHING to address the problem in the next 14 YEARS?
They the Republicans LIKE millions of American citizens being without healthcare. They think that –as a American citizen — you have a DUTY to obey their corrupt laws , to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes so that Republican Presidents can steal them and that you should go give your life in some shithole on the far side of the world if it benefits the Boys Down in Houston. But you –as citizen — get nothing in return.
I mean , it is NOT like the Republicans are proposing a compromise over several alternatives. They don’t want to even address the problem — they exist solely to fuck the common citizen. So why does NO ONE in Washington point that out?
June 19th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I think there is much more to the Ensign story than has come out in the mainstream media. This is not just a simple affair with a staffer. There appears to be employment law violations involved with Doug’s dismissal, and possible sexual harassment of Cindy.
Plus, this has always been TPM’s model. Find something that smells dirty then follow it like a bulldog to find where it leads. It is the opposite of the normal “fill the news cycle” approach which is not really journalism, but short-attention-span-theater.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:52 am
TPM has always been pretty high on political sleaze; they’re like a traditional city newspaper that way. They even give one of their annual awards to the “Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality”.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Someone’s jealous of Josh Marshall. At least two someones, it seems.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:40 am
This is the sort of thing TPM does–it just happens to involve an affair this time, but my sense is the full court press has been triggered by the extortion and pay-off stuff.
That said, I am currently just passing over all their Ensign coverage. I assume it will somehow get my attention again if something particularly interesting comes up.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:47 am
It’s funny how low Republican fortunes have sunk, that people think this is all uninteresting.
Imagine if this had come out during the impeachment era.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:51 am
yeah matt, i remember when the eliot spitzer affair came to light, conservative media more or less took a pass because they had much more substantive stories to focus on. are you kidding me with this? its a HUGE story and nobody’s bothering to cover it except TPM, so yeah, i’d say that’s probably why they’re covering it.
June 20th, 2009 at 7:02 am
One assumes TPM feels it is possible that Ensign will have to resign the Senate entirely, not just his leadership position. There may be more here than just the routine, Republican family values hypocrisy.
June 20th, 2009 at 7:12 am
“What’s with TPM’s wall-to-wall John Ensign coverage?”
I dunno. What was up with Drudge’s wall-to-wall Lewinsky coverage?
Jealous much? You guys need to lighten up.
June 20th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Why can’t TPM do serious things like praising Third Way, or promoting incrementalism in health care reform?
June 20th, 2009 at 8:23 am
It seems there are certain liberals who don’t want to win. Quite simply, if they do it to you you do it to them to teach them a lesson. It is the only way hypocrites and bullies will learn.
June 20th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Not to mention hypocritical bullies, like Ensign. He must go.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:21 am
BTW the tendency to embrace hypocrites as moral police is a sickness in conservatism.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Attention, class. Here is the quiz.
1) When the Congressional Budget Office scores proposed health care reform at $1.6 trillion over ten years, the Senate Finance Committee and all official Washington goes into a panic, drastically cuts back the package, and puts health care reform in danger.
2) When George W. Bush proposes more than $1.9 trillion of tax cuts skewed heavily toward the wealthy, these packages are enacted within a matter of weeks.
Discuss.
The Bush tax cut were wrong politically and economically, but their stated purpose was not to reduce the deficit. Health reform is supposed to reduce the cost of health care. That’s the point. The US spends too much on health care; we need to reduce it. Increasing expenditures by even 1 trillion over ten years is too much. What about zero? What about savings?
June 20th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Not to mention hypocritical bullies, like Ensign. He must go.
Oh, give me a break. David Vitter actually broke the law by hiring actual prostitutes and he’s still in Congress. Ensign’s not going anywhere.
As for Josh Marshall, there’s a million more useful things he could be doing than this, covering anything from the health care push to the imminent death of Waxman-Markey. TPM’s finest moment remains the Social Security fight in ‘05, when Marshall spent all his time tracking politicians’ positions and trying to nail them down. That could actually be useful. This Ensign stuff isn’t going to accomplish anything.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Attention, class. Here is the quiz.
1) When the Congressional Budget Office scores proposed health care reform at $1.6 trillion over ten years, the Senate Finance Committee and all official Washington goes into a panic, drastically cuts back the package, and puts health care reform in danger.
2) When George W. Bush proposes more than $1.9 trillion of tax cuts skewed heavily toward the wealthy, these packages are enacted within a matter of weeks.
Discuss.
The Bush tax cut were wrong politically and economically, but their stated purpose was not to reduce the deficit. Health reform is supposed to reduce the cost of health care. That’s the point. The US spends too much on health care; we need to reduce it. Increasing expenditures by even 1 trillion over ten years is too much. What about zero? What about savings?
June 20th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Oh, give me a break. David Vitter actually broke the law by hiring actual prostitutes and he’s still in Congress. Ensign’s not going anywhere.
Ensign should resign.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:53 am
When Maureen Dowd plagiarizes you, you can snark about Josh Marshall. Until then, it’s just the green-eyed monster talking.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:55 am
“Health reform is supposed to reduce the cost of health care. That’s the point. The US spends too much on health care; we need to reduce it. Increasing expenditures by even 1 trillion over ten years is too much. What about zero? What about savings?”
In order to reduce the cost of my heating bill, I had to replace every window in my house. Big upfront expenditure, and I won’t recoup that the first year. But I did see a significant drop in my heating bill last winter.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Re ThomasH at 36: “Attention, class. Here is the quiz.”
———–
The answer is: Soak the Fucking Rich.
Take every fucking cent.
At the point of an 82nd Airborne bayonet if need be.
Next question?
June 21st, 2009 at 1:20 am
TPM’s coverage is rather strange caused by Josh’s ego and autocratic direction.
I don’t know why there are so many Ensign updates as opposed to more measured releases – maybe he wants to keep this story alive.
Another change I’ve noticed at TPM is that it has turned partly into a News for Jews site – stories involving Jews are more important than others. They had like 5 time the coverage on the Holocaust museum shooting as they devoted to other recent right wing terrorists. Israel and the Mid-East also get disproportionate coverage.
Stephen Jay Gould was a good scientist and an often excellent and insightful writer. One reason I subscribed to Natural History magazine was so that I could read his monthly columns. However in the last years of his life he seemed to be pre-senile – all of his columns involved some wrong done to a Jew or Jews though often the mention was just in passing and not his increasingly vague central point. After reading 10 such columns in a row it almost became a game of guessing how he would bring Jews into the story line, and ultimately it seemed that he started with the wrong and then created the column so he could include it.
I’m not saying Josh Marshall is pre-senile like JSG was but he definitely definitely is pushing an agenda that might not be quite rational.
June 21st, 2009 at 6:19 am
Concern troll Brendan Nyhan, who does as much or more to help Republicans as anyone mislabeled a “lefty” can do, decides that it’s unseemly for a website called MUCKRAKER to be investigating a moralizing hypocrite’s tangled web of funneling his Party’s political money in squirrely ways to the family of the woman he’s having an affair with?
The investigation is unseemly to concern troll Brendan Nyhan?
Not the overwhelming hypocrisy?
Not the taint of political money being funneled to pay off the family?
Not the evidence that the FOX Republican Channel was concealing the accusation of the affair by the husband?
Not the dubious claim of extortion that increasingly seems fraudulent?
Not the fact that other Republican leaders knew full well of the scandal and possible money shuffling?
The question is, what is Matthew Yglesias doing elevating a concern troll over excellent investigative journalism?