Justin's Political Corner
Perhaps you think you’ve read or heard it all. Hell, I even wrote my own book about it, So Wrong for So Long,. But now Rachel Maddow is promising surprising revelations in her MSNBC special Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, next Monday night in her regular time slot.
It will be President’s Day, but it looks like she sure won’t be celebrating George W. Bush. Or the mainstream media.
The special marks the opening of what will surely be a slew of tenth-anniversary programs and other media revisits. If you want to go back yourself now: Ten years ago today Hans Blix made another fateful presentation to the United Nations on his team’s search for WMD in Iraq. It was said to bolster both opponents and proponents of a US invasion, since he still found no evidence of such weapons but Saddam was still not cooperating fully with inspections.
Why does this all matter? Well, consider this major Washington Post piece last night on Iran allegedly boosting nuclear program by pursuing certain…magnets. It never ends.
The doc is partly based on the book Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff but reportedly goes beyond it. An NBC press release claims the documentary features “new and original interviews with members of the Bush administration, the CIA, members of Congress and other insiders who were part of the internal debate over the ultimately faulty-intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq.
More excerpts on the Yellowcake lies here and on “Cheney’s Speech” here and on “The Build-up” here and WMD not found.
The Rachel Maddow Show: Investing in children shows strong returns.
Segment from Thursday’s show that discusses Oklahoma’s Early Childhood Education programme … which was also the subject of a segment on NPR’s This American Life several weeks ago
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has been nominated for a Grammy Award.
Maddow is a nominee for the audio version of her book Drift in the “Spoken Word Field.” She is up against some steep competition, including President Bill Clinton and comedianEllen Degeneres.
h/t: TVNewser
(via Your helpful Thanksgiving charts about the deficit)
Rachel rocks as usual.
As Rachel promised on the show, here are the charts that show the U.S. deficit is not growing but shrinking — in fact, it’s shrinking faster than at any time since the end of World War II. The first chart comes from our own Steve Benen. The second is from Jed Graham at the Conservative-biased Investor’s Business Daily. Let us know how it goes out there, will ya?
Particularly impressive were the results of the two powerhouse programs on the MSNBC lineup: Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. Maddow won seven of the eight days against her Fox competition, Sean Hannity. For the 8-day run Maddow beat Hannity by 18% and her 544k average was second to only Bill O’Reilly in all of cable news. O’Donnell won all eight days against Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. His margin of victory over Van Susteren was 17% for the eight days.
This can no longer be considered a temporary blip on the ratings scales. With two weeks having elapsed, the MSNBC programs are showing steady strength against competition that was once thought insurmountable. Only Bill O’Reilly is holding his top position for Fox in primetime. This may indicate that Sean Hannity is wearing thin with viewers who are likely disappointed with his overly confident (and harebrained) assurances that all the polls were wrong and that Mitt Romney would emerge victorious.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Last night, Rachel Maddow took the right to task for existing in a media bubble divorced from reality:
Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to over sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And Climate Change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the Moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.
Decades ago, the right wing , backed by a lot of corporate money, built itself a massive media machine with the express intent of manipulating public opinion. And it worked! The nonstop flow of scripted propaganda convinced millions of Americans that they were under attack by gays and blacks and immigrants and liberals and terrorists and Muslims (same thing, really) and atheists and possibly even Bigfoot! It worked so well that Karl Rove declared that reality would henceforth be whatever they said it was.
Of course, the problem is that reality is not terribly subjective and reportedly has a liberal bias. An orange is an orange. An apple is an apple. Trickle down economics has never worked. Allowing Wall St. to run rampant collapses the economy and insisting that Obama couldn’t possibly have won Ohio doesn’t actually change that he did.
What we have witnessed is an entire political movement buy into its own bullshit.
If we’re lucky, Maddow is right; the bubble will pop and the GOP will finally start having serious discussions about how to solve our problems. More likely, though, the right will contract on itself in a spasm of ideological purification and internal witch hunts. They will become even more extreme and insular. This will hurt in the short run as the Senate GOP filibustering and House GOP hostage taking will continue. The upshot is that the country has already rejected this fundamentalist attitude and will be repelled by more of the same to such a degree that the GOP will wither and die in a prison of its own making.
On MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow explains today’s presidential election and the 1st four years of Barack Obama’s term in office.
Happy 4 years to #trms on MSNBC. We love @maddow and her truth-telling abilities.#rachelmaddow
— Justin Gibson (@JGibsonDem) September 12, 2012
