Starr isn't the only conservative who signed the letter. Former Solicitor General (and counsel to the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project) Ted Ols0n did too. Maybe most remarkable to me, since I've debated him, is the signature of torture-defender David Rivkin. If Cheney's gone too far for Rivkin, that's pretty far indeed.

I'm amused by the fact that Cheney's biggest defender is Wrong-way Bill Kristol, who's almost always wrong about almost everything. He predicted some conservative lawyers would sign the letter of protest, sneering "The legal fraternity doesn't like criticism of lawyers."

Starr's response? "I love Bill Kristol, I view him as a friend. But this is not consistent with the great traditions of our country and certainly of our profession...very fine traditions. [The condemned lawyers] deserve commendation. They do not deserve criticism at all. This was very unwise."

I love that it's Cheney and Kristol, two of the nation's top beneficiaries of affirmative action for conservative white people (which is far more widespread than any preferences for minorities), who are still insisting their shameful attacks are reasonable. Like naughty spoiled children, they're happy their high jinks are rattling their elders. Kewl!

But I don't think this helps Liz Cheney in her reported quest to redeem her father's legacy by running for Senate in Wyoming or Virginia. For all these conservative lawyers to immediately smack her down suggests she's a) dead wrong and b) not well respected. This is a public humiliation for Cheney, and on a lesser scale, for Kristol. It shows they don't understand "the finest traditions of our country."

Honestly, both of them are starting to look like the washed-out later generation of once-relevant elite families. We all know how that happens. I could be wrong, because being mean and conscience-free counts for a lot in politics today. But this won't be the last time Cheney is rebuked.

 

 

Before I attack that false equivalence, let me make clear: I'm not defending these Democrats. I said on "Morning Joe" Tuesday that Paterson should resign, given the mounting evidence that he abused his power to help an aide duck a serious domestic violence charge. I was a Blagojevich critic like every other Democrat, and I wrote at the time that it was wrong to seat Roland Burris in Barack Obama's Senate seat after Blagojevich's cynical appointment. 

But this is another dramatic case of the double standard the media can't seem to avoid when it comes to Republicans and Democrats. The big difference between the two sets of scandals is that GOP corruption in 2006 was big-time, it was systemic -- and much of it was covered up, ignored and, in some cases (House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, anyone?), perpetrated by congressional leadership. Nancy Pelosi's team came in and developed ethics standards and investigation protocols that are working in the Rangel case, standards that many Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, opposed. 

If you simply examine the corruption scandals, there is no comparison. (This post by the great Joe Conason is a must-read.) 

Rangel is accused of taking a free trip to the Caribbean and failing to report $70,000 in rental income on his taxes (though there are other allegations being investigated); disgraced GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham admitted he took $2 million in bribes. Rangel gave up his committee chairmanship (admittedly reluctantly) once he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee this week; Tom DeLay didn't resign his leadership post after he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee, or cited for campaign finance violations by the FEC. 

And unlike Democrats, Republicans rallied around their corrupt leader. Unbelievably, the House GOP changed its own rules so that DeLay could stay on as majority leader even if he was indicted. 

Indeed, DeLay was indicted, and he finally resigned his speaker post after that. But it took him months to resign his House seat. 

There's also nothing on the Democratic side like the Jack Abramoff scandal, which tainted a lot of GOP Congress members and reached up into the Bush White House (where Karl Rove's secretary was a former Abramoff employee; the two men enjoyed dinners and basketball games together). The Abramoff scandal resulted in the conviction of GOP Rep. Bob Ney, two Bush White House officials and nine GOP congressional aides. 

Let's move on to sex. Rep. Eric Massa resigned Friday, only days after reports surfaced that the House Ethics Committee was investigating whether he sexually harassed a male aide. Former GOP Rep. Mark Foley, by contrast, survived several reports of wrongdoing and only resigned after ABC News revealed sexually inappropriate instant messages with an underage House page. The bigger scandal in the Foley case was the way GOP House leadership treated the sexual harassment reports. A chain of high-level GOP aides, reaching into the office of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, was shown to have known about Foley's issues months before the conclusive IMs were revealed.

Finally, contrast the fates of Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican David Vitter. Both men admitted patronizing prostitutes. Spitzer resigned; Vitter didn't, and he's running for reelection to his Senate seat with his party fervently behind him. 

I could go on. Clearly corruption and sexual high jinks go on in both parties. But Republicans tend to rally 'round their wrongdoers, and Republican leadership protects them, while Democrats have done a demonstrably better job dealing with their messes, which are also smaller potatoes than what we witnessed with DeLay and Abramoff. But will voters be able to tell the difference? Not if the media collude with Republicans to push a false equivalence. 

I discussed these issues Friday with Chris Matthews and Bob Shrum on MSNBC's "Hardball." I think I did OK. 

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The video produced by FoundingBloggers.org opens with three quick shots of Breitbart shrieking – at journalist Max Blumenthal, One Peoples Project Daryle Jenkins and The Washington Independent's Dave Weigel. If we'd edited it quite that way, Breitbart would have called it unfair. But this is how his Big Government site wants the story to go.

"You're the most despicable life form I've ever seen!" he screams at Blumenthal. "Get out of my face, get out of my face, get out of my face!" he yells at Jenkins. "Fuck. You. John. Podesta!" he shrieks into Weigel's….notebook? I think so. The sight of the large-ish Breitbart bending over to be at shouting level with Weigel's pupik doesn't seem to belong on a video trying to deny he's having a breakdown. As the opening to a pro-Breitbart video, it's a counter-intuitive approach, I gotta say.

The narrative gets a bit more Breitbart-friendly from there, for a minute, mainly because the video is shot from behind the rightwing media mogul's back, which makes him look less unhinged than when the viewer is staring into his snarl (as when watching Mike Madden's Breitbart's videos on Salon). But you can't accuse Marcus and the videographers of cutting out the crazy. They actually show Breitbart's ultimate breakdown: When Madden asks, reasonably, whether James O'Keefe and Breitbart ever exposed ACORN abetting actual prostitution (rather than the prank prostitution O'Keefe and Hannah Giles tried to represent), Breitbart, by anyone's measure, kind of goes off the deep end, shaking and shuddering and flapping his hands as he yells at Madden:

They posed as a pimp and a hooker! I don't understa-a-a-nd what you're taking about! Why do you think that's a point? Why don't you care about ACORN? Why don't you care about ACORN? Do you only care about the nuances? Did you see the tapes? Are you insane?

At the end of that segment the video shifts to show my Breitbart blog post on Salon, so you can actually see Breitbart's face, as filmed by Madden, full of rage. So they're not white-washing what went on, to their credit. I guess.

The crux of Marcus's argument is that Breitbart's hysteria is justified, because in Breitbart's words, "The worst thing you can do ...in politically correct America…is accuse somebody of being a (sic) racism." Certainly some journalists have examined the racial point of view that motivated Breitbart's young protege, O'Keefe. Blumenthal's Salon article detailed O'Keefe's involvement in a white nationalist debate featuring American Renaissance's Jared Taylor (we corrected the article to take out the charge that O'Keefe helped organize the event). Blumenthal and the New York Times and others have written about O'Keefe's racially tinged pranks at Rutgers, where he organized a spoof "affirmative action bake sale" (where minorities got discounts) and protested the cafeteria carrying "Lucky Charms" cereal because it belittled Irish Americans. Then there's that silly pimp stunt, with a fur coated costume borrowed straight from blaxploitation movies. It's fair to raise questions about O'Keefe (and Breitbart's) racial attitudes.

But even more to the point, it's ludicrous to say the worst thing you can accuse anyone of today is "being a racism," or even a racist, as Breitbart argues. It's clearly worse to be accused of supporting death panels for elderly people, of usurping the presidency you're not eligible for, of being the murderous "Joker" from the Batman series, of being a totalitarian Marxist when you're a mainstream corporate Democrat – all the charges the increasingly unhinged right routinely toss at Barack Obama.

So Breitbart's playing the victim is particularly funny, especially as he tries to build his self-promoting "Big Government," "Big Journalism" and "Big Hollywood" sites -- and also make Big Threats. The video ends with Breitbart once again menacing liberals. "Fuck. You. John. Podesta!" we see him yell again --again into Dave Weigel's pupik. Breitbart walks on, bent over, a little breathless: "What's in your closet, John Podesta? Big Podesta? Big Soros? Do you want us to play these games? Because we're playing to win!"

Then he walks away from Weigel, his bulky backpack slung over the shoulder of his rumpled suit, into another CPAC breakout room, a lonely warrior looking for his next battle with liberalism.  A few days later he promised Fox News's Greg Gutfeld he'd bring down the "institutional left within the next three weeks." That doesn't leave much time. Stay tuned.

Here's the Founding Bloggers video posted on Big Government:

 

 

 

But it's also possible that the public option is dead. I will mourn it, but if that's the end, there's a new opening for progressive Democrats: Organize around the expansion of Medicare, even demanding Medicare for all. It's a simple demand for a popular program. Hell, the Republicans even made defending Medicare part of their dishonest crusade against the Democrats' reform efforts. If they like Medicare so much, they should be happy to expand it.

Of course they won't. But as Joe Conason argued Wednesday, the dishonest Republican "defense" of Medicare should be the Democrats' best argument at Blair House Thursday. Because the fact is, many leading Republicans still want to unravel Medicare and turn seniors over to private insurance. Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the party's rising stars (he doesn't come off as stupid, mean or irrelevant on television; God bless John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, but they're unwatchable), is actually pushing privatizing Medicare. This after his party made the Democrats' efforts to cut wasteful Medicare spending the foundation of its counterattack on reform bills. Suddenly the GOP was defending the program it spent years fighting, while deluded Republican voters of a certain age spent the summer demanding the government keep its hands off of Medicare, which is, yes, a government program.

Seriously: Even as the Senate minority leader is waxing outraged about Obama's healthcare proposals, here:

"Our constituents don't want yet another partisan, back-room bill that slashes Medicare for our seniors, raises a half-trillion dollars in new taxes, fines them if they don't buy the right insurance and further expands the role of government in their personal decisions."

Paul Ryan's fiscal "road map" would give senior citizens vouchers to buy their insurance on the private market -- to cope with Anthem, the poster child for profiteering, rate-hiking insurance companies.

The GOP hypocrisy on Medicare is staggering. Let's hope Democrats take Conason's advice. And if the public option goes down this year, as many predict, liberal Democrats should come back and organize around an expansion of Medicare, a popular program made more popular this year. I'm an ardent defender of the so-called public option, but even I have admitted I'm not entirely sure what it means -- and if I'd been in charge of naming it, I'd have picked something else entirely.

But about this year, I want to be clear: Even if Democrats like Tom Harkin find they don't have the political strength to pass the public option, I believe that the outlines of a health reform bill visible now, only attainable with the 50-vote maneuver of reconciliation, is still worth making the law. If it passes, it will be the most important social justice legislation passed since Medicare. Yes, it is flawed, but it can be fixed. It must pass.

Finally, on this point: I'm disappointed that Rep. Anthony Weiner wasn't invited to the Blair House Summit. His outburst on CSPAN Wednesday -- denouncing the Republican Party as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the insurance industry -- made Democrats across the nation cheer out loud. There was only one problem with it: Weiner could have noted that some of his Democratic colleagues have been purchased by the insurance companies too. Still, watch Weiner as captured on "The Rachel Maddow Show," and let's hope some of the Democrats attending the Blair House summit show the same spine.

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His son, Ken Hunter, told local reporters he was tired of the media paying too much attention to the fractured and incoherent political beliefs espoused by the demented Stack, and not enough attention to his father's life:

"There was just too much going on about what the guy did and what he believed in, and enough's enough. They don't need to talk about him. Talk about my dad. You know, some people are trying to make this guy out to be a hero, a patriot. My dad served two terms in Vietnam. This guy never served at all. My dad wasn't responsible for his tax problems."

Hunter said his father was the kind of guy who'd have tried to help Stack with the tax troubles that supposedly drove Stack to the violence that took Hunter's life.

Googling "Vernon Hunter" on Monday night I was stunned by how little the national media, beyond Bunch, Crooks and Liars, the Associated Press and ABC's "Good Morning America," had paid attention to Stack's victim. "GMA" seemed to write about Hunter  because the show featured Stack's daughter from his first marriage, Samantha Bell, calling her father a "hero." To her credit, Bell retracted her statement, and labeled Hunter the hero, when she learned about the man her father killed.

Stack's daughter may be forgiven bad judgment in the wake of losing her father. American politicians can't. I cut new Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown some slack the other night -- Brown compared Stack to the "frustrated" voters who backed him last month, "who want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives." But I haven't seen Brown retract or clarify his comments since Hunter's identity was discovered, and that's disappointing.

Far worse than Brown is Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who embraced Stack's grievances four days after his attack and three days after Hunter's body was identified:

"I don’t know if [Stack's] grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. … It is intrusive and we can do a better job without them entirely."

Human Events editor Jed Babbin should win the bottom-feeder award for joking about Hunter's killing at that confab of crazy, CPAC. Talking about his friend Grover Norquist, Babbin quipped:

"I'm really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

I'm sure the Hunter family enjoyed the humor.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that posters at the racist site Stormfront.org are Stack fans, with one proclaiming "The Guy is a true Hero!" Since we don't yet know the nature of Stack's anti-government beliefs, I won't file him with the anti-government, anti-Democrat and anti-Obama armed lunatic fringe that's emerged since we elected our first black president. Yet. But it is certainly worth noting that Stack just happened to kill a black man; and the right-wing racist anti-Obama Birther who struck the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., also killed a black man, Stephen Tyrone Johns.

Without proven connections between the killings, it's just a sad coincidence. But let's mark it here, and hope there's no reason to identify any kind of pattern. Let's hope that fervently. My condolences to the family of Vernon Hunter.

Letter: Vernon Hunter wasn't just a name to me

by Christine Edgar

I grew up with Ken, one of Vernon Hunter's 6 kids, and I first learned about the tragic events when Ken posted on Facebook that he was racing to Austin hoping that by the time he got there, his father would have been found alive. We were all stunned to learn that Vernon was the one person killed. It just seemed so random and unfair.

Ken's politics and mine are diametrically opposed to each other; Ken's a staunch conservative, and I'm nearly as far to the left as he is to the right. Most of our interaction on Facebook until now has been political debate. But when this happened, our differences seemed inconsequential, and all that mattered was that Ken is a good man who had been a friend to me in high school, and that his beloved father had been taken from him by a domestic terrorist. It's very distressing that some people are now hailing the man who killed Ken's father as a hero.

I disagree with Joan Walsh that Vernon Hunter's race might have had anything to do with why he died. I find it highly unlikely that Stack would have targeted his attack that specifically. But I do think that Mr. Hunter's race might partly explain why so little has been said about him elsewhere in the media. Thanks, Joan, for putting Vernon Hunter's face and his name forward. He was not a symbol. He was a person with family and friends who loved him, and who have been devastated by his loss. 

Until Beck, though, Saturday was pretty much all Andrew Breitbart, all the time. Madden got the Drudge/HuffPo factotum turned Big Journalism impresario to lose his stuff twice on Saturday – but it didn't just happen to Madden. Various news outlets from Salon to Politico to, yes, Big Journalism caught Breitbart in different states of meltdown. Below you'll find a video guide to Breitbart's CPAC breakdown. But before we introduce those amusing videos:

First, we'd like to clear up some Breitbart misstatements. He opened his attack on Madden blasting Max Blumenthal's piece on ACORN pimp James O'Keefe's "race problems" for placing O'Keefe at a "white supremacist conf-fab." Salon corrected that piece after we learned our sources had no firsthand knowledge that O'Keefe helped organize the right-wing white-nationalist debate – but we never used the term "white supremacist con-fab." It's funny, Breitbart's flunkies have in the past demanded we "retract" that phrase, even though we never used it.

Additionally, Breitbart told Madden he wasn't a fan of Salon's Henry Hyde adultery exposé at the start of the Clinton impeachment follies. Shocking! Talking to Madden, he claimed former Salon editor David Talbot argued "the ends justified the means," but I'm pretty certain he's referencing a Gary Kamiya essay at the time that argued "ugly times call for ugly tactics." Breitbart was also upset Salon ran several articles about GOP adulterers in that era, and he seemed to acknowledge we'd gotten tips about (but didn't run articles on) many more.

He was maybe even more exercised by a satirical article by Dan Savage about covering 2000 Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, in which Savage claimed to have tried to infect the anti-gay Bauer and his staff with his flu. (Of course, Salon immediately said we didn't assign Savage, a freelancer, to do that, and Savage later confessed he'd taken a Jonathan Swift approach to the story.) The second time Madden spoke with Breitbart, the right-wing activist attacked Savage's story in even higher decibels. Suddenly it wasn't clear whether slamming James O'Keefe, exposing Republican adultery, or threatening to give anti-gay right-wingers the flu was tops on Breitbart's list of transgressions.

Still, I'm impressed that Breitbart is seething at Salon stories that are more than a decade old. I'm not quite sure why, though. He would seem to have the world on a string, with his patronship of young conservative muckrakers like pretend pimp O'Keefe and his pretend prostitute Hannah Giles, and his "Andrew Breitbart presents" Big Journalism site. It all seems to be going very well. I don't understand why he's so angry at Salon, and Madden, and the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel, and Max Blumenthal, and everyone else he attacked this weekend. My advice to Breitbart is to let his journalism speak for itself. That's what Salon does, and it's worked well for almost 15 years. Vein-swelling red-faced snarling at other journalists? That may feel good – actually, it doesn't look like it feels very good at all. But either way, it doesn't get the work done.

And here are the greatest hits of snarling Breitbart's Saturday meltdown: