Confidence Men - Why the myth of Republican competence persists (RAT Gigglefest Alert!)

The Washington Monthly ^ | September 2002 | Joshua Micah Marshall

[Timesink]

It should be noted that the Washington Monthly's demographic consists almost entirely of hardcore Democrats, so Marshall is preaching to the choir and thus had no need to write something that contains any statements close to reality. He's actually a smart guy and capable of much better than this; I hope he just wrote it to get a nice check from the magazine for only a few hours' work, and to perhaps get himself a few new sources inside the party. If he's actually started believing this stuff himself, then the RATS must have a far better brainwashing program than we ever suspected!

Anyway, read it and have a little laugh.

[dead]

The first few sentences of the second paragraph were so screamingly inaccurate I had to bail out early.

I'm done.

[Southack]

"We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton's stock price plummeting..."

Once I saw that lie, I quit reading the "article".

If the author won't write that it was a massive abuse by trial lawyers that brought a huge jury award against Haliburton (for asbestos liability of a small firm that Haliburton purchased) that sent HAL's stock price down the drain AFTER Cheney had left the company, then what good is listening to anything else that he/she/it has to say??

[stlrocket]

Funny - I got to exactly the same place in the article and quit reading as well.

It is just amazing how these people can spin and twist everything so well.

BILL CLINTONS LEGACY

[parsifal]

What crap. Bush and GOP have got their problems, but Bill Clinton was a pitiful excuse as a manager. Never on time. Tried to micromanage everything. Was indecisive. Glib. All glitter and no substance. I remember when Clinton was running in 1992, Arkansas had a problem with state DHS and the excuse was "Gee, there are 8,500 employees. How can we manage a dept that size." Naturlich, the GOP was too stupid to piuck up on that and mention that there are places in gov't with 8500 people in ONE BUILDING. parsy.

[tet68]

It's interesting how the writer begins denigrating the administration at the beginning of sentences, but by the end negates his own opening remarks. And he does this constantly through out the article.

Let's be honest. As upset as you may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team.

On the merits, the collapse of the Bush administration's energy policy or its bumbling on Social Security were missteps of at least as great a magnitude. Yet nobody leaked details about the internal struggles, and so no accusations were leveled and no one had to admit that anything had gone wrong. Robbed of these particulars, journalists had a difficult time writing the story, since, in the absence of juicy narrative, they would be required to explain and analyze policy matters. And that's not a story most journalists are equipped to write.

. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, the administration insisted they were going to do it anyway, believing that if you project confidence and invincibility, others will come around. And to a remarkable extent that's just what happened.

In the Bushies' lexicon this is called "leadership." And to some extent it is. Getting people to follow you by force of personality, persuasion, and will is the essence of leadership. In fact, some of the qualities that make the president so great at scamming the policy process proved to be his greatest strengths in the first phases of the war. Bush was supremely confident and appropriately indifferent to complexities that might have distracted a more thoughtful, but less resolute, individual (read Bill Clinton ).

And I will leave you with this little subliminal slip.

"leadership" is just a confidence game. And over time, that kind of leadership will get its butt kicked by reality every time.

And he is absolutely right, Clintonian con game leadership got it's butt kicked in Somalia, and The USS Cole, and the Embassy's and the WTC TWICE .

[TN Republican]

Skip down to this part - it's a real gut-buster.

Most journalists are Democrats. But that doesn't necessarily help Democrats or hurt the GOP in the way whiny conservatives like to imagine. In a Democratic White House, journalists identify with the administration, whose policies and beliefs tend to mirror their own. But this familiarity makes it easy to criticize when things go wrong (and even when they don't). Reporters understand a Democratic administration's flaws more readily because it's made up of people much like themselves.

[Timesink]

And I will leave you with this little subliminal slip....Ha ha!! I didn't even catch that when I read it. Sure says a lot.

The more I think about this article, though, the more I realize that it's a sign of the total intellectual bankruptcy that the Democratic Party has sunk into over the last 20 years (especially the Clinton years, which ended up completely covering in slime every Democrat in the country, even the intelligent ones), and are now left with nothing except the desire for power retention.

When you put this article into the pot, boil away all the rhetoric and look inside to see what's left, and you only see three words: "Why Bush Sucks." It's an acceptable belief to have - Lord knows we despised Clinton, and still do - but they can't provide a single shred of argument as to why Al Gore, or any other Democrat, would be better. Nor can they even cough up any actual evidence to show Why Bush Sucks; every single piece of supposed proof offered up in this article relies on distortions, lying by omission or outright falsehoods. This article needs a good old-fashioned line-by-line Fisking, as the bloggers call it.

[small voice in the wilderness]

Reporters understand a Democratic administration's flaws more readily because it's made up of people much like themselves. This is a large part of what made the media's relationship with the Clintonites so toxic.

You guys really should have read further; you would have seen this nugget. I must have missed the deadly mixture that belched forth from his memory bank. I could have sworn, and will to my last dying breath, that is was the media's relationship with the Clintonites that made the country SO toxic. They will never, never, realize just how close we came to the point of no return in this country. And how large a role they played in it.

[Timesink]

Yeah, I loved that part to. Handy hint to liberal opinion writers: When the president gets impeached, or is caught receiving "service" from a girl almost as young as his daughter in a room right next to the Oval Office, journalists are going to cover it, and it's going to be the top story for a long time. It doesn't matter whether the president is GOP or RAT. The only thing that outweighs a journalist's desire to cover all stories from a distinctly left-wing viewpoint is his desire to be a muckraker that changes the course of the entire nation by reporting on corruption and sleaze at the highest levels of government.

[Timesink]

"Yeah, I loved that part to." Ugh. To = Too, obviously.

[Timesink]

evening bump

[speekinout]

I can't laugh at that. It's a bunch of lies that Liberals are all too ready to believe, and we already know how many Liberal votes there are in this country.
All of clintoon's "great accomplishments" were lies. The good economy was a lie, the stock market bubble was a lie, the "peace process" was a lie. That man must spray himself with truth-repellant every morning!
And still the Liberals believe.

[Cacique]

Bookmark for later read bump

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

MY GOSH they are in their own little world arent they

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Joshua Micah Marshall is a writer...Idiot... living in Washington, DC. Until March 2001 he was Washington Editor of the American Prospect. His articles on politics and culture have appeared in The American Prospect, Blueprint, The Columbia Journalism Review, Feed, The New Republic, The New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Talk and The Washington Monthly. He has appeared on Hannity and Colmes (FOX), Hardball (MSNBC), O'Reilly Factor (FOX), The Point (CNN), Reliable Sources (CNN), Rivera Live (CNBC), Washington Journal (C-SPAN) and talk radio shows across the United States. He is a graduate of Princeton University and is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation in Colonial American history at Brown University.

[Wondervixen]

In just a few paragraphs I got confused...Who were the confidence (con) men? The Gore camp? Clinton? Jeffords?

[Morgan's Raider]

In a Democratic White House, journalists identify with the administration, whose policies and beliefs tend to mirror their own.

Kinda says it all in a nutshell, doesn't it?

[Morgan's Raider]

...But this familiarity makes it easy to criticize when things go wrong (and even when they don't). Reporters understand a Democratic administration's flaws more readily because it's made up of people much like themselves. This is a large part of what made the media's relationship with the Clintonites so toxic. At its nadir, coverage of the administration got caught up in a vortex of baby-boomer self-loathing; familiarity bred contempt.

...Followed by three more sentences of lies to go with the rest of the venom in this article.

[Theodore R.]

It wouldn't matter how many clintonoid lies the GOP exposed: 49 percent of the American people would have never believed that "their bILL" told the first whopper. And many, if they admitted one lie, would joke about it and say "it's only about sex." The American people are more pro-clintoid than many Republicans think.