NOW with Bill Moyers. Transcript. January 23, 2004 | PBS

MOYERS: So Howard Dean committed what pros say could be a terminal no-no. He got so hot under the collar in a cool medium that his campaign seemed to melt down right before our eyes.

Someone put his Monday night bombast to music and the cable channels and rightwing radio jocks are playing it over and over. Pundits and opponents hinted he came unhinged and is ”unfit for higher office.”

Even some faithful Democratic voters were shaken at the sight of a candidate sounding more like a pugilist than a President.

Horrified, the doctor’s gurus called in the cosmetic team who worked overnight on a full makeover: softer tones. More pastels. A touch more wonkery about healthcare. Dignity, Doctor, dignity on the media’s terms — even if to get it the other Dr. Dean, his wife, had to leave her examining room and patients to sit for an interview with Diane Sawyer.

The media want penitence, Doctor — penitence, served up with a dash of tact and deference — with cultural cool. I don’t know Howard Dean, have never met him. I don’t have a horse in this race. But I’ve been around long enough to know that on Monday night he did violate the 11th commandment of the medium-as-message: Thou shalt not be intemperate before a microphone. Unless, of course, you are intemperate on talk radio, or cable television, where fortune smiles on the bully and fame rewards excess.

A lot of people are gloating over Howard Dean’s foot-in-the-mouth disease. Among them, says Tina Brown in THE WASHINGTON POST, are establishment Democrats — the big-money guys — who are breathing easier now that Vermont’s Don Quixote has crashed his noble Rocinante into the windmill. With all that money raised from the internet rabble, with malcontents and idealists rallying to his side, with so much pent-up rage at a system that allows you to pick the public’s pockets as long as you do it with a smile and hurrah and good manners. Well, Howard Dean was just too unfashionably independent and unpredictable for comfort inside the Beltway.

The cameras caught him in flagrante politico, the unpardonable sin: daring to let go, losing it in the cause.

So the picture I’ll remember from the week is not of the candidate as raging bull, but this one: his subdued young followers, made suddenly aware of sudden death brought on by an overdose of spontaneity in an age where only the image counts.

mjh’s Blog: Think for Yourself

I’m so tired of the Media determining what is acceptable or not. Reporters have become critics….

mjh’s Dump Bush weBlog: Citizen Dean

There’s A Little Bit Of Dean in Me by Paul Vitello, Newsday.com

Dean has spoken for me. …

NOW with Bill Moyers. Transcript. January 23, 2004 | PBS

MOYERS: In his State of the Union address, President Bush gave us a preview of his re-election campaign. He got 29 standing ovations. But behind the scenes, some conservatives were grumbling about the soaring federal deficits and the President’s failure to confront them. …

MOYERS: After Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon in the 70’s, CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] helped to resurrect the Republican party, with grassroots activism, determination, and Ronald Reagan.

The reward: control of the White House and Congress today.

But the conservative revolution is heading into middle age and new complexities. Traditional conservatives argue now over key questions.

For example: can Homeland Security and civil liberties coexist?

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia is now working not just with the American Conservative Union, but also the American Civil Liberties Union.

BARR: The direction the party at the national level seems to be going in is to have more and more power to the government to find out more and more about individual law abiding citizens, less and less privacy. …

MOYERS: The big discussion at the conference this week, as it was across the Potomac River in Washington D.C., was about the growth of government spending.

Six conservative watchdog groups have joined to rebuke the administration, charging that Bush isn’t even doing as well as Bill Clinton, and isn’t close to living up to Ronald Reagan’s example. …

BARR: I do worry that at least on fiscal matters at the national level the party seems to be going in the direction of becoming a sort of Democrat-lite party in terms of federal spending. And I think that’s very dangerous for the long term strength of the Conservative movement and certainly for the Republican Party.

MOYERS: Richard Armey spent six years as the Republicans’ majority leader in the house.

ARMEY: Conservatives can get disillusioned, they can get disconcerted, and they can stay home. One hundred percent of the Democrat vote will be out for the presidential election. President Bush cannot afford to have any percentage of his vote stay home, and that’s where, if he loses the election, and I don’t think he will, it’ll be because some of his vote stays home. …

MOYERS: Joining me now to talk more about the conservative agenda is David Keene. He’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union, the largest grassroots conservative organization in the country.

MOYERS: One of your conservative colleagues, Stephen Moore of the Conservative Club for Growth, says that the Bush state of the union has become a state of dependency and a state of entitlement. And Paul Weyrich, another one of the founders with you of the Conservative Movement, says profligate spending by the Republicans in Congress is twice the rate under Bill Clinton.

KEENE: That’s not an opinion, Bill. That’s a fact.

MOYERS: That’s a fact.

KEENE: Non-defense discretionary spending under Clinton was going up at about 2 1/2 percent. And under Bush it’s been going up roughly twice that. And I think that the Republicans, unless they want to lose definition, the definition of their party and what they mean to the base out there that supports them in election after election, have to come to grips with the fact that they are letting that definition be eroded by acts that they would never contemplate were they looking at somebody else doing it. …

MOYERS: What, in essence, defines a conservative today?

KEENE: I think I’ll go back to what Mike Pence said in opening this conference this week. We talked about the conservative desire for a smaller and limited government. A government that doesn’t tax people to death, a government that doesn’t regulate them to death, a government that doesn’t spend money that doesn’t exist.

We talked about the fact that conservatives believe in a strong defense, believe in being able to defend our population and in traditional values that conservatives have historically stood for. And Mike put it very effectively. He said, “If you don’t believe in those things you can be our friend, you can be our ally. We’ll work with you. But you don’t have the right to stand up and call yourself a conservative.”

MOYERS: But, David, I have to come back to this. George W. Bush is spending non-existent money faster than anybody in modern times. He’s expanding the power of the state with not just homeland security and the war of terror abroad but with one extension of domestic agency after another. I mean, do you really consider him a core conservative?

KEENE: We consider Bush to be a conservative who’s allowed the ship to drift a little bit off-course. And we’re yelling to get it back on-course and I think we will. You know, the jury, in a sense, is out.

There’s A Little Bit Of Dean in Me by Paul Vitello, Newsday.com

Dean has spoken for me. Whether I ever get to vote for him or not, Dean has captured the real frustration in me, and I suspect millions of people, as citizens of a country gone nuts. …

Dean is the only one who ever voiced the level of anger and alienation I’ve felt since the launch of the war in Iraq. [mjh: many would say ‘since the 2000 election.’] …

The angry Citizen Dean was right on all counts:

President George W. Bush launched the war on Iraq without evidence that Iraq played any role in 9/11 or in any other terrorist attacks against the United States.

Bush’s government virtually suppressed intelligence from within its own agencies warning us that there was no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bush insisted on this massive expenditure on this unnecessary war while the economy was in the tank.

Bush thumbed his nose at the United Nations and our European allies when our own intelligence community – and probably our own State Department – knew that their doubts about the war were justified.

Bush insisted on a second massive tax cut in two years, primarily for the wealthy, in the midst of this vastly expensive and needless war.

The capture of Saddam Hussein did not make the world safer from terrorism.

This is just the bill of particulars in foreign affairs. Dean has made a strong case against the Bush government’s domestic policies, too. But the point is, he did it first and he did it resoundingly. He said the war was wrong, and he never added a “but … “

FactCheck.org Bush A Military ‘Deserter?’ Calm Down, Michael

Reporters Dig In

After the Globe story, partisan websites denounced Bush as ‘AWOL’ and worse. One is even named AwolBush.com . But other news organizations dug in and came to much milder conclusions.

George Magazine reported in October of 2000:
It’s time to set the record straight . . . . Bush may have received favorable treatment to get into the Guard, served irregularly after the spring of 1972 and got an expedited discharge, but he did accumulate the days of service required of him for his ultimate honorable discharge.

The New York Times reported Nov. 3, 2000:
But a review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns (about Bush’s absence) may be unfounded . . . . A review by The Times showed that after a seven-month gap, he appeared for duty in late November 1972 at least through July 1973.

The Washington Post also reviewed records and concluded:

It is safe to say that Bush did very light duty in his last two years in the Guard and that his superiors made it easy for him.

Ironically, this issue blew up in Wes Clark’s face as Peter Jennings tried to make a big deal out of it. Media should report; let the bloggers spin. ;-) mjh

Boston.com / News / Nation / Infiltration of files seen as extensive

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004
WASHINGTON — Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. …

[T]he scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar — or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws. …

After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as “mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch.”

Hatch also confirmed that “at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports.”

No one should be surprised that zealous Republicans will spy and steal — that’s becoming two of the planks of the GOP. I almost feel sorry for Hatch, who might have a trace of decency. More shocking is the blasé way one of the criminal-staffers brushes this off. And note the role of Robert Novak, who helped the White House betray a CIA agent. mjh