Just a Final Word about Robert Gibbs

I think he was right.
He may not be the most naturally popular person in Washington or even in the Administration, but part of his brief is to keep an eye on the media for the White House and to report back to his boss about what’s being said as such.
I guess Gibbs is a company man as much as anyone who works for an establishment, having to listen, day in and day out, to various and sundry spin spun your way about your company or your brand. It’s never a good company man who turns tail and agrees with the person making the insinuations.
The media tries this all the time. How many politicians have you seen sit in front of a pundit-cum-interviewer and how many times have you seen them try every trick in the book for a gotcha moment?
It’s been well over a year since the first of the Obama-criticisms emanated from the Left, or that part of the media which considers itself Left. Bill Maher, a real Leftie – a Progressive who believes in the Death Penalty, who’s anti-Union and believes in stringent gun control whilst admitting to owning a gun, himself – bragged all of the second part of last year about how he started the real criticism of the President, by saying he’d done nothing after 6 months of holding office. He ended the year with a series of tweets, calling the President “Barry” and likening him to George Bush.
For all of the past 8 months, Gibbs has heard the Professional Left nitpick, parse, second guess, misinterpret and deride everything this Administration has achieved, and – admit it or not – the Administration has achieved a lot – a significant lot. Each time these thought manipulators were proven wrong, they blithely ignored their mistakes and, instead, parsed about the Presidents comments, actions, what-have-you for something else about which to criticize, carp and complain.
They took purism to a new level and, in doing so, became as guilty of deliberate misinformation and delusion as anything for which they ever derided Fox News. In fact, they descended to the level of Fox News in sensationalism, obsession and sheer tripe.
They have become blatant to the point that when they are genuinely challenged, by a colleague or even a politician, they are adamant in righteous indignation, as if they can only be the ones who are right about what a President should say or do, and everyone else is wrong. They willfully take advantage of viewers who, in their own way, are as incapable of critical thought and interpretation as any of their counterparts who populate the Teabagging Rightwing hanging on every word of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
I read the words of a Spanish-born naturalised resident of Washington state, desperate to be considered a member of the Progressive Left, assuring members of a like-minded forum that she gets her news from Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann and reads Huffington Post as her “daily newspaper.” Rachel Maddow blithely admits to David Letterman that people watch opinionators’ shows to find out the opinion of the person whose name is on the billing.
Why? What happened to people digesting facts and forming their own opinion.
The saddest thing about all of this, is that the people who buy into this deliberate misinformation, from Rush’s dittoes to theh people who swear by Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher as gurus, political aspirants and saviours of the country, bristle and bite back with belligerance against anyone who dares to criticize these imperfect demagogues’ interpretation of how the President is getting it wrong. They defend these corporate media whores with the same ferocity as a religious fanatic defends his faith, never mind their obvious contradictions. Bill Maher praises the public option all season long on Real Time, then – at the season’s end – discloses to Bill Frist, in an unguarded moment, that he doesn’t trust government-administered healthcare. Ed Schultz berates listeners on his radio broadcast last week to boycott voting in the Mid-Terms to SHOW the White House what they think of them, in reaction to Gibbs’s venting, then praises the White House, smilingly on his television program the following day.
The faithful public don’t bat an eyelid, and the demagogues laugh all the way to the banks which contain their off-shore accounts.
Gibbs was right. He hit back and gave the pundits of the Professional Left a taste of their own bitter medicine, and the ones at which he aimed, showed that they couldn’t take the dosage.
And I applaud Gibbs’s non-apology too. At the beginning of the Obama administration, in the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s announcement that he wanted the President to fail, several ranking Republicans, including Michael Steele, made disparaging remarks about Rush in public statements. Almost immediately they said these things, they rushed to apologise, in an act akin to scores of mafiosi kissing the hand of the reigning don. More than anything this confirmed the fact that Rush Limbaugh, media figure, is the de facto head of the Republican party.
For Gibbs to have attempted any modicum of apology would have been tantamount to admitting that the likes of Olbermann, Schultz, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington controlled the Democratic party and pulled the Presidential strings.
Imagine a country polarised by and controlled by the likes of Rush and Beck on one side and their counterparts Schultz, Olbermann and co on the other. It doesn’t bear imagining.
What’s saddest of all is that two elected Congressmen, both facing stiff competition in the Mid-Terms, should call for Gibbs’s resignation. Keith Ellison was the first, who did so in an interview with Huffington Post, then later tried to wriggle out of that in an interview with his local paper, intimating that Huffington Post lied. While I’m first on the list to question the veracity of HuffPo, with their murky anonymous sources purporting to know the minds of public figures, even they wouldn’t risk a libel charge of actually saying someone said something he didn’t without printing a retraction. No retraction is forthcoming, so one is left to assume that Ellison thought better of his remarks, thinking that perhaps he might need some campaign help from the White House.
I would think that Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress, might have been better off directing his comments elsewhere, like at the growing Islamaphobia being not-so-subtly encouraged by the Republicans throughout the country, rather than taking time to make petty comments about the President’s Press Secretary which have nothing to do with him at all.
Ditto Alan Grayson, a man I actually admire very deeply for his political passion, courage and conviction; but Grayson’s on television – and specifically on certain programs on MSNBC – a lot lately, and I fear he’s in danger of believing his own hype. To call for Gibbs’s resignation, when Gibbs was directing none of his remarks to Grayson is one thing, but to infer that “a lot of people he knows” refer to Gibbs as “Bozo the Secretary,” was conduct unbecoming a member of Congress. Had Gibbs made comments about Congress in particular, spleen could be explained; but the media serve Grayson and Ellison at their whim, and they’d be well advised to remember that today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain.
Fifty-two years ago, in a speech given to a media convention in Chicago, the great Edward R Murrow, a giant to whom Keith Olbermann dares compare himself in action and mannerism, offered prescient warnings about the state of television, and the danger of it being used, in all spheres as an instrument to entertain, amuse and insulate. Those qualities have entered into the news sphere in a particularly pejorative way, and Murrow is probably spinning in his grave at some of the political hackery practiced by the man who considers himself Murrow’s spiritual son, amongst others of his ilk today.
Let’s take stock of Murrow’s speech, herein recreated by the actor David Strathorne from the film, “Good Night and Good Luck”:-



For those of you who are unfamiliar, it might be a good idea to read about Murrow’s media fight against Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist pogroms against innocent citizens. Throughout it all, Murrow offered little opinion in the way of Special Comments. Instead, he showed the McCarthy proceedings and interviews on film and let the public – a public considerably more innocent and less educated than the public today – decide for themselves.
I would love it if Americans could find their own opinions again, without the help of media bullies like Limbaugh, Schultz and others.

Tango'd from the Tanning Bed

Yesterday morning, I opened my copy of The Guardian to learn that various tranches and services of the British National Health Service were being outsourced to private providers and, leading the fray for tenders, was none other than our old friend, Humana – AKA Bill Frist Inc.
I was drinking my coffee at the time. I didn’t have a Pepsi moment, and I didn’t vomit in my mouth. I simply smiled wryly, because I’d seen this coming.
The NHS has been an albatross around the neck of the Conservative Party in Britain since Maggie Thatcher chopped dental and optical services from its auspices back in the 1980s, and Cameron wanted to take this further. Last summer, there were stories abounding here of how the Tories intended on reforming the NHS, how it was working at a loss – things everyone had known as truisms for a long time, but things no one would think of addressing because, well, because the NHS here is the Third Rail of Third Rails.
And when the GOP started airing pejorative commercials in the US, railing against rationed medical treatments and long waiting lists, basically presenting the NHS and all like her in a pretty crass light, Cameron flip-flopped and came out fighting for the NHS. Well he should do, because his oldest child, who had recently died, was born with severe birth defects and had depended on the NHS for care and treatment. Then and there, Cameron vouchsafed the safety of the NHS under any potential Tory regime.
Well, the Tory regime is a reality – albeit, officially it’s a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; but more and more, instead of the pundits referring to a ConLib pact, they’re calling the coalition “ConDem” in a clever jeu des mots.
Because, under the guise of austerity moves, this government – cleverly caricatured by the resident Guardian cartoonist as consisting of Cameron as a louche and depraved version of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy wickedly enticing Nick Clegg, depicted as a rosy-cheeked and cheerfully ignorant version of Pinocchio, to come and play in his termite-infested sawmill – is systematically dismantling any and all entitlement schemes from the government.
This is Thatcherism Mach II: Trickledown – the Sequel.
When the coalition took control of things, once again Cameron reiterated that the NHS would suffer no cutback in services. Then, in the special emergency budget, Camerons Treasury wonk, George Osborne, an independently wealthy trust fund child who’s never worked a day in his life, blithely announced that all government departments must cut budgetary spending from between 25% and 40% – except the Defense Department, which would only suffer cutbacks of 10%. Of course.
And, of course, this would mean immense numbers of civil service and outsourced contractors being laid off prematurely – some permanently – in this age of recession.
Now, it’s not rocket science and I’m no economist, but saying that the NHS wouldn’t suffer any cutback in services, and then saying that that same department has to cut its budget by between 25 and 40% … doesn’t that kinda sorta mean that somewhere along the way, services are going to be cut? You can make as many paper-pushers redundant as you want in the NHS, it still stands to reason that x amount of nurses or doctors or some sort of specialist personnel won’t be being hired, that various forms of surgery/treatments/drug therapies won’t be implemented because of lack of funding.
As painful as it is for me to say it, and as many times as Progressives who don’t know have accused me of lying, the GOP’s commercials last summer did have a bare ring of truth about them; because here in the UK, in some areas, healthcare is rationed, there are waiting lists for surgeries and treatments. It’s simply a postcode lottery, and your quality of service reflects how well your health authority has managed its budget. My primary healthcare trust is a pretty good one, but a pregnant woman still has to have her labour monitered up to a certain point in one hospital, before she’s transferred, at breakneck speed, fourteen miles to another hospital in order, actually, to give birth.
The announcement that Humana were entrenching themselves in the tendering process confirmed suspicions I’d been having for the past few months, when every night on commercial television here, you see no less than five different advertisements for private health insurance, and when – out of the blue – commercials for Viagra have started to appear. (Contrary to life in the United States, prescription drug remedies aren’t advertised on television in the UK or in Europe.)
The NHS wouldn’t actually cut services to the public; instead, they would outsource them to private entities, probably for a fee. That would, at least, justify the increase in NHS contributions we’ve now had inflicted on us – yes, America, the NHS is NOT free; we pay an additional tax called the National Insurance to cover this – but the public was surreptitiously being edged and manipulated into buying into private health insurance schemes.
I’d love to give the clever ConDems the benefit of the doubt and say they’re gently edging us into a more French-like, hybrid system, but knowing Thatcher’s children as well as I do, I know this is nothing more or less than what it actually is … a CON. It’s incremental change that will inch along until one day someone will blink and realise that the good old NHS just ceased to exist somewhere in the first five-year fixed term (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) of Blueboy Cameron and Pinocchio Clegg.
The British public had been had. They had been, in local parlance, tango’d.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press (a venerable national treasure of a program which has managed to go from the sublime to the ridiculous in the two years since the late Tim Russert’s death), Robert Gibbs, the President’s Press Secretary sounded a codified clarion call to Democrats, grassroots, elected and electable: there was a very real possibility that the Democratic Party could lose control of the House.
NUDGE. NUDGE. WINK. WINK … HELLOOOOOOO?
Immediately, he said that, the cable news boys and girls went into meltdown, along with the Wicked Witch of the West’s lovechild, Arianna Huffington. Like Chicken Littles rolling about in orgasmic frenzy, they all screeched simultaneously that Gibbs admitted weakness, he admitted weakness, there he goes, I heard him, he said it … You get the picture, illustrated with a myriad of nameless, anonymous sources, all offering different insight, opinion and second guesses.
The Fox minions affected the smug smirk of “I told you so”, intimating that this was all the more reason straight-thinking people should vote Republican in November. The MSNBC contingent and Mother Huffington huffed and puffed and clicked their teeth, not saying, but clearly intimating that it really wasn’t worth the bother at all to vote for such losers.
People still able to think for themselves (and to read Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post) got the message loud and clear, coming – not coincidentally – on the back of the President’s campaign trips to Missouri and Nevada in support of Robin Carnahan and Harry Reid, and the message is this: Nobody’s guaranteed a win, and the Democrats aren’t entitled to even assume they’ll retain control of the House. Just like on a sports team, intimating that players have to fight for a place in the starting eleven, makes them keen, hungry to attain it. So, the Democrats hoping to retain their House seats should go on the offensive. So, the Democrats hoping to win a House seat should drive that offensive home. So the grassroots supporters should turn OFF the cable guys, stop listening to the rhetoric of a Keith Olbermann who doesn’t vote, stop reckoning that Bill Maher always speaks the truth when he admits Obama’s achieved more legislatively than FDR at this point, but in the next breath says he’s done nothing and endorses Romney, and stop listening to Arianna Huffington’s purrings and subtle ad hominem musings about Barack Obama, mindful of the fact that she is, was and always will be a Republican at heart. (Listen, the original Damascene conversion was hearsay handed down at best; at least hers, which took place on November 3, 2004, was, first and foremost, a money-making venture to fill a niche against Matt Drudge). Voters have to think for themselves, and listen to the candidates.
It’s nerve-wracking that Nancy Pelosi allowed herself to fall prey to her own hubris in reacting to this message personally. It’s as though she didn’t see the forest for the trees.
The ammunititon is all there for the Democrats – the GOP’s refutation of Wall Street Reform, their determination to repeal that and the healthcare reform, their embracement, through Congressman Barton’s apology, of BP and big oil, the overt ambition of the Queen Mother of snake oil salesmen, Darrell Issa, to bring articles of impeachment against Obama.
But most of all, the big bazoomba is this: the Republicans are running without any iota of an alternative plan to put this country back together. They are running on NO and that’s running on empty. They are running on lies and innuendo and hate and something one drop short of out-and-out racism. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the people. It’s the power they want.
John Boehner can sip from a styrofoam cup and demand to know, “Where are the jobs?” But what is his answer? As a politician who questions, he should be questioned too. If he’s as dissatisfied with the jobs situation, as an elected official, he must have some inkling of an alternative, workable plan. It would be too much to believe in a conspiracy of dunces, to believe that private enterprise is holding off hiring and potentially restoring the economy a smidgeon, just to ensure that there might be a GOP victory in the House after November, thus making it look like a trump card held up the collective Republican sleeve … would it? And yet, how many of us remember the coincidence of Iran releasing hostages days after the inauguration of that Republican saint, Ronald Reagan.
As the Brits would say, pull the other one. It’s got bells.
So bells ought to be ringing, and the Democrats and their supporters should come out swinging. We have ample enough ammunition at our disposal – and also enough to shoot ourselves in the foot.
We can’t be had like the Brits were had in May by their sinister, yet cackhanded coalition. The big tent of the Democratic Party has to buck up, suck up and sure as hell not fuck up … or risk being tango’d from the tanning bed of John Boehner.