Maddow, Ifill, Olbermann Meet With Obama

In January, Obama met with conservatives George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks.

On Monday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among several people who attended an off-the-record briefing with Pres. Obama at the White House. Sources tell us other attendees at the two-and-a-half hour chat included Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gwen Ifill of PBS and Gloria Borger of CNN. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one from Fox News was in the room. For the complete list of people who met with Obama, visit TV Newswer

Fox and friends carp and gripe and Rachel does some good reporting:

It Wasn't "You Lie." It Was "You Lie, Boy"

It's about time. The media is finally coming around to reality. The wingnut backlash against Obama is being caused by a racist undercurrent in this nation, which is strong, despite the fact that the majority elected Obama. Look at how emboldened Joe Wilson has been after his "apology," an apology that he made clear wasn't something he was inclined to do but something that the leadership required him to do. You'd think he would've been shamed and embarrassed. But no. He's been running around establishing cred with the wingnuts. Wilson is now the hero of Rush Limbaugh. That says it all. As Maureen Dowd points out in her column today, he is a wingnut:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
Read the whole thing

Maureen Dowd: Palin is the Best Story Ever

Sarah Palin hates the media but if it weren't for the media, no one would care about Palin.
It's only the media that continues to float her as a presidential candidate. If she becomes a candidate, it will be because of the media. It's as if Sarah and the media have this bitter love affair going on that we get to witness. They're always going at each other in public.
Maureen Dowd, who has an interesting column in the NYT that contrasts Palin and Hillary Clinton, explains why the media continues to cover her:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Obama Meeting Liberal Media Tonight

Last night he met with conservatives, including Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. 
Tonight: 

Barack Obama may have dined with conservative columnists Tuesday night, but that doesn't mean the president-elect is leaving the liberals out. Politico's Michael Calderone reports that Obama met Wednesday at his transition headquarters with a group of pundits from the left, including Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson. (Some moderates were included as well.) Salon

Sitting in Abe's Lap

Obama gets his first presidential briefings today. 

Maureen Dowd at the NYT wrote a great column today about the promise of Obama:

The Obama girls, with their oodles of charm, will soon be moving in with their goldendoodle or some other fetching puppy, and they seem like the kind of kids who could have fun there, prowling around with their history-loving father.

I had been amazed during the campaign — not by the covert racism about Barack Obama and not by Hillary Clinton’s subtext when she insisted to superdelegates: “He can’t win.”

But I had been astonished by the overt willingness of some people who didn’t mind being quoted by name in The New York Times saying vile stuff, that a President Obama would turn the Rose Garden into a watermelon patch, that he’d have barbeques on the front lawn, that he’d make the White House the Black House.

Actually, the elegant and disciplined Obama, who is not descended from the central African-American experience but who has nonetheless embraced it and been embraced by it, has the chance to make the White House pristine again.

I grew up here, and I love all the monuments filled with the capital’s ghosts. I hate the thought that terrorists might target them again.

But the monuments have lost their luminescence in recent years.

How could the White House be classy when the Clintons were turning it into Motel 1600 for fund-raising, when Bill Clinton was using it for trysts with an intern and when he plunked a seven-seat hot tub with two Moto-Massager jets on the lawn?

How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry?
....
In the midst of such a phenomenal, fizzy victory overcoming so many doubts and crazy attacks and even his own middle name, Obama stood alone.

He rejected the Democratic kumbaya moment of having your broad coalition on stage with you, as he talked about how everyone would have to pull together and “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”

He professed “humility,” but we’d heard that before from W., and look what happened there.

Promising to also be president for those who opposed him, Obama quoted Lincoln, his political idol and the man who ended slavery: “We are not enemies, but friends — though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

There have been many awful mistakes made in this country. But now we have another chance.

As we start fresh with a constitutional law professor and senator from the Land of Lincoln, the Lincoln Memorial might be getting its gleam back.

I may have to celebrate by going over there and climbing up into Abe’s lap.

It’s a $50 fine. But it’d be worth it.

Powell: Experience Helpful But Judgment Matters

Powell's endorsement of Obama was a grand thing. But even better for me, expressed in Maureen Dowd's story, is that he actually said it: What's wrong with being a Muslim?
It seems all of us were cowed because we had to defend against the constant barrage of idiot attacks. We knew calling Obama a Muslim had a whole other meaning for McCain Palin supporters. The truth is, McCain Palin supporters, the rabid ones, don't just dislike extreme Islamists. They hate the entire religion. They think it breeds terrorists. Don't let them fool you.
I have watched Powell's endorsement over and over because it is soothing and reassuring that maybe this time intellect will win out.

NYT: In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.

Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.

The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.

“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.” Read the whole thing.

The Sad Spiral of John McCain

Joe Biden said this morning at a rally in Florida that Palin's smears against are Obama are wrong and McCain knows better. He said McCain went out and hired the same smearers that smeared him when McCain adopted his daughter from Bangladesh (there were rumors that McCain had an affair). 

Biden, stealing a line from Sen. Bob Casey, said "You can't call yourself a maverick when all you've been is a sidekick." 

I, like many people, have never known the Maverick McCain, the one that Palin likes to talk about. We just look at her bemused, kind of the way Obama looked at McCain last night. For those of us who never knew, all we see is a man out of control, trying to tear down Obama by innuendos and exploiting people's racial prejudices. McCain has signed on to the year-long underground wingnut attacks on Obama, that have tried to push Obama as a secret Muslim terrorist.

Maureen Dowd skips the snark and tells of McCain's descent: 

NYT: But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.

John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire.

Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man. In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges:

The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.

Sound familiar?

Obama Battles McCain and Hillary

I've come to the conclusion that this is the reason that Obama isn't further along in the polls. Obama is battling two political machines.

Hillary could long ago have put her diehard supporters to rest. It's what Obama would've done. He would've rallied his supporters, who would've been just as ticked off and angry, behind Hillary. He would've told them the cause is greater. For Hillary, it's been about ego. 

If Obama wins, it will be a major feat.
Maureen Dowd puts her snarky spin on it:

“Obama should have picked you, Hillary,” John McCain tells her. “It isn’t fair, my friend. But it just makes it easier for me to whup him.”

“Don’t worry, John, I’ve put it behind me,” Hillary replies. “I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.”

They chortle with delight.

“He’s a bright young man, but he got ahead of himself,” McCain says. “He needs to be taught a lesson, and we’re the ones to do it. Have you seen the new Bloomberg poll? Obama’s dropped and we’re even again. The Bullet’s getting all the credit, but you and I know, Hillary, that it’s these top-secret counseling sessions we’re having. And thanks again for BlackBerrying me the Rick Warren questions while I was in the so-called cone of silence.”

“Oh, John, you know I love you and I’m happy to help,” Hillary says. “The themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity, when we’re rich celebrities, too. Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card — that one always cracks me up. And accusing the media, especially NBC, of playing favorites. It’s easy to get the stupid press to navel-gaze; they’re so insecure.” more

McCain picked up where Hillary left off and the media is running with it for now.

Hillary's Diehards Can't Vote for Skinny Black Man

NYT's Maureen Dowd, typically more snarky and to the point, alludes to racism playing a part in the Hillaries (the PUMAs) loud opposition to Obama.

All you need to do is visit the diehard Hillary websites and you would see it's not about feminism at all -- many say they're actually going to vote for McCain. See, they don't even care to defend Michelle Obama. I'm tired of these people and I think they're a vocal minority. 

NYT: Perhaps it is because feminists are still so busy cataloging past slights to Hillary that they have failed to mount a vivid defense of Michelle Obama, who has taken over from Hillary as the one conservatives like to paint as a harridan.

And this:

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices. (McCain must be cast as Wickham, the rival for Elizabeth’s affections, the engaging military scamp who casts false aspersions on Darcy’s character.)

In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial, with only 31 percent of white voters telling The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.

And this is a good mask for prejudice:

In The Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick wrote that Hillary supporters — who loved their heroine’s admission that she was on Weight Watchers — were put off by Obama’s svelte, zero-body-fat figure.

“He needs to put some meat on his bones,” said Diana Koenig, a 42-year-old Texas housewife. Another Clinton voter sniffed on a Yahoo message board: “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”