George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the lunatic fringe now. The only people who will still stand in the same room with them are Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose reelection in 2006 was the worst mistake Connecticut voters have ever made, and the Beltway pundits.
This latter group comprises brain-dead panty-waists (David Broder, Joe Klein, Kookie Roberts, George Will, Sally Quinn, Robert Novak, Larry King), all of whom grovel at the feet of power because they've been around it for far too long and are thus incapable of separating politics from friendship.
The most recent proof of the corrupting influence of power can be found by scanning the list of people who wrote letters to Judge Reggie Walton to spare the convicted felon I. Lewis Libby prison time: everyone from James Carville to Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger to Sen. Alan Simpson. For the full 373-page printout of the "Scooter Libby Love Letters," go to www.thesmokinggun.com.
This sobering litany offers one letter after another from lobbyists, ex-elected officials, corporate CEOs, Beltway consultants and, like Carville, "pundits," all singing the same tune about what a great guy "Scooter" is. This group is ghoulishly reminiscent of the cliques in high school. Apparently it sickened Judge Walton—a true American hero—and he sentenced Libby to 36 months in the slammer.
Bush's approval rating now stands at 26% (and, seriously, you have to wonder about the sanity of this true-believing "core"), members of his own benighted party are abandoning him, GOP 2008 presidential candidates dare not mention his name on the campaign trail, and even the Fourth of July celebrations seemed curiously muted, all because of Bush and his dirty little war.
But, even without the Libby pardon, it had already dawned on 75% of Americans that Bush must be stopped. The pardon will only harden this view.
Because the Beltway pundits—most of whom regularly shared cocktail wienies with Scooter—dictate the overarching "theme" of the mainstream media, where would the American people have gotten such an idea if not from the usual outlets?
That is, where did they find the truth?
Blogs.
Just look at the political stories that have dominated the past two years. During that time, print and broadcast journalists got their asses kicked by the new voice of the people—vox bloguli.
The two biggest national news stories—the Plame case/Libby trial and the mass firings at the U.S. Attorneys' office—were both driven by the doggedness of blogs. The late, lamented Steve Gilliard was so dead-on accurate in his forecasts about Iraq that you wonder how so-called "experts" could be so consistently wrong if some guy in a small room in Harlem with a modem and a clip file could be so damn right.
Members of the media based in the Nation's Capital have themselves to blame. Now, not only are their jobs at stake, their very profession is in tatters. Why? They suck.
Firedoglake (www.firedoglake.com) owned the Libby trial coverage and now owns the Libby pardon fallout story. Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) owned the prosecutor purge story, which the mainstream media dismissed as a partisan fishing expedition (because that's what David Broder & Co. told them it was).
Only TPM's Joshua Micah Marshall's tenaciousness kept the story alive long enough for the mainstream press to get off its collective barstool, stagger over to their laptops and do a Google search or two.
Bottom line: support your favorite blogger. Bloggers are the Sons and Daughters of Liberty.
