We've achieved the surest sign that the Siegelman affair could ignite into a white-hot national scandal: The Washington Times is denouncing the whole matter as a conspiracy theory -- just like all those nutty theories to arise out of the JFK assassination.
Editor Robert Stacy McCain prefaces his comments with these words: "Let's play devil's advocate for a minute." I would suggest that the Moonies have been doing that job for a much longer period of time. I would also suggest that anyone who takes a paycheck from a Korean "messiah" has no business accusing JFK researchers, or anyone else, of irrationality.
For the real scoop, compare these Moon-mad maunderings to the reportage of Larisa Alexandrovna, Muriel Kane and Lindsay Beyerstein. Here. They reveal how Rove managed to meet with guys like Jack Abramoff outside the White House, in order to bypass those tell-tale visitor logs. We also learn more about email-gate.
Local media manipulation has become a recurrent theme in the commentary evinced by our own humble posts on the Siegelman affair. I'm finally beginning to understand: A purchased press is one big reason why the "solid South" is so solidly Republican. There, more than anywhere else, Democrats need to find a way to break through the wall.
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Does the gentleman need reminding that the South gave us the last three Democratic presidents? And despite the Nixon-Reagan-Atwater-Rove 'Southern Strategy', Clinton, Gore, and Kerry all won electoral majorities without winning the South.
Do you hear John Edwards now? He's remarkable. He has reinvented "the middle class" to include everyone who isn't a politician, lobbyist, or corporate officer, and he's made them all the plaintiff he represents in a class-action suit against the "corporate greed" that has been controlling the government. He even invents a scenario with him as the voters' lawyer asking the energy companies and the insurance companies to willingly give up their control and settle without a fight. Then Edwards reminds everyone how he beat those corporate lawyers, and he exults, "I was born for this!" (That's in his ad also, without the exultation.) He also does something that's very elegant when he defines "the middle class": he establishes it in generational terms rather than socio-economic terms. His and our parents wanted to leave for us a better world and life than the one they had, and we-all want the same thing for our children, a better world than we had -- but corporate greed has made it almost impossible. Of course he describes his own humble and hard-working "middle-class" origins, how he was the first to go to college. He says he was born for this and I believe him now. He has made his narcissism part of his message, and it's about time. His own enlightened self-interest has a lot of narcissistic kin out there. Iowa looks like a dead heat, no clear victor, but many frontrunners, all thoroughbreds, and it's about damn time! Even Bill Richardson is great, and smart, and funny, and humble in his way, and a governor. New Hampshire won't decide anything either. All the candidates are first-rate, there's no one to eliminate yet. It's quite a contest. And yet no president or new Congress can ever make it right again. Those days are gone forever. The Manifest Destiny doctrine is no longer teachable or ethical. Without it, the US is bereft of a national narrative and mythos. We can't 'stop' China and then India from their dominating 'the market' and the politics of the planet. We should quit while we're ahead and become an art form of a nation with high-tech art colonies where inventions will be made to save us, a museum and a model nation, the neutral arbiter of grievance, but ten times bigger than Switzerland with ten times more to offer the world.
good points, aitchd. it IS fascinating that the south has produced all these great dems without actually supporting them. such is the romance and whimsy of the south, i guess.
here now for the holidays, i passed thru chapel hill, where the edwards live. have to tell you, folks there nearly worship them both, but especially her. she's spoken of in near-saintly terms, and sounds arrestingly genuine. him, too, actually.
as for the republican foothold here, sure, the purchases of the press have contributed, but it's more than that, really. many of those old southern owners were already republicans from the great conversion of 1980, otherwise known as the southern strategy. the republicans, especially reagan himself, knowingly courted the racist southern dems with thinly veiled rhetoric of 'states' rights'. remember ronnie in philadelphia, ms, where civil rights workers had been murdered, announcing his presidency with that rhetoric?? so that piece is deeply embedded and doesn't really require any republican 'outside infiltrators' to take control of the press. the sentiment is, sadly, alive and thriving here; all they needed in the 80s was an outlet.
but there is the good side of the south, as well, that gave us all the heroes who 'overcame', including the last three dem presidents.
as for edwards' strategy to make corporate power the boogeyman, you can likely guess that he's speaking my language, and eloquently. i feel intensely that this is precisely what is needed to turn the country around. much like fdr did in '32. we need major trust-busting and regulation and criminal prosecutions!! it's true that no one individual can make it right again, but the country is clearly sensing this, as well, a need to recover our integrity, for real this time. and i think this time they also know where it has to happen, in the face of unbridled corporate greed. edwards knows that, and not just on a political level (i disagree that his narcissism is driving his politics), but on an ethical, moral level. we can't go on like this for another day, and it will require someone with a prosecutorial bent to bring the offenders back in line.
i just fear the republican party is so far gone it will do everything in its power to sabotage a real recovery. that's the difference between now and watergate.
though i agree that the dem field is inspiringly strong and deep, more and more edwards is getting my attention, and my allegiance. it's also encouraging to see that he is the ONLY dem candidate who can beat all the repug candidates. just hope the dems realize that in voting in their respective primaries.
The Southern thing goes back further than St. Ronnie -- to when the Wallacites of 1968 were first being courted by the New Right. And of course it was about race. It's always been about race, far more than about newspapers.
Though come to think of it, I haven't heard race mentioned as a factor in the Siegelman business. Is it there under the surface or not? Because if the major issue is now the corporations and Governor Riley's wooing of business interests, then maybe something really has changed.
Banking and real estate pretty much define the South's economies, and the newspapers tend to be organs for Southern progressive boosterism. If the banking and real estate folk feel like a Democratic administration would help them, they'll vote that way, at least for the president. Lately those folk are in a bad mood.
In the old days, newspapers in the South had no home-town big league sports teams. In the North and Midwest, a jillion people read the papers every day so they could read about their team. They could argue every day from empirical facts. That has to matter. I don't know, but I think a large part of the old Democratic base were big-league sports fans. Anyway, Howard Dean has committed DNC resources to attract the NASCAR Weltanschauung. (dr. elsewhere, you'd support an Edwards choice of Elizabeth de la Vega for AG, wouldn't you?)
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