How can people write smack like this?

I'll probably post on this again.  Or maybe not. Cause it makes me sick.  I knew that Howard Fineman isn't the best political reporter who ever published.  But I can hardly believe he put his name to something like this: The 'Media Party' is over MSNBC 01/11/05.

It nominally is exploring the implications of CBS' embarassment over their fumbled story about Bush ducking his National Guard duty.  But actually, it's one of those cases where we see, to paraphrase Bill Moyers somewhat, the delusional has become mainstream.

What Fineman lays out in this piece is a conspiracy theory, specifically the Republican true-believers faith that there's a Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!  It's just shamelessly bad.  It's such a complete crock that, despite my lack of confidence in today American mainstream press, I just amazed that he wrote this.  I shouldn't be, I know. 

James Wolcott does an entertaining takedown of the Fineman piece: Howard Fineman: Still Searching for the Perfect Shade of Lipstick 01/12/05.  For instance, he takes on Fineman's fantasy construct of antiwar politics during the Vietnam War:

The notion that Vietnam and Watergate were press "crusades" is an ignorant and idiotic telescoping of history. During much of the buildup and carnage in Vietnam, the establishment papers and newsweeklies (Time, particularly) were resolutely for the war as a bulwark against Communist incursion in Southeast Asia (the domino theory), as were the American people. The opposition came from the fringe--Ramparts, Evergreen Review, underground papers, I. F. Stone's Weekly (I.F. Stone, who should be the patron saint of Koufax bloggers)--and bled into the mainstream middle as the carnage continued unabated with no end in sight. Reporters in the field who saw how badly the war was going constantly fought with their editors in NY and DC, who watered down their dispatches. The press turned against Vietnam when the chasm between what was coming out of the Pentagon and White House and what their own reporters were telling them and their cameras showing them became too wide to bridge. It was an unfolding process. (If Walter Cronkite had said the Vietnam war was unwinnable in 1966, he would have sounded like a mad prophet. By 1968, when he issued his dire prognosis, he was voicing what so many knew but had been reluctant to say.) The public slowly turned against the war because of the mounting casualties, deaths that seemed more and more futile. The Gallup Poll today showing that 50% of the American people now believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reflects the same pattern of attrition.

Eric Alterman makes a point about the CBS firings and the related discussion that is also relevant to this ridiculous Fineman piece of ideological hokum: Rather conpiratorial 01/12/05.

I’m still sick, and more than that, I’m sick of Dan Rather.  I was very much hoping to keep this a Rather-free zone but this can’t be helped.  It’s too depressing.  The internal CBS panel, led by former Republican politician Dick Thornburgh, have given CBS News a clean bill of health on the charge of political bias because, well, they asked and Rather says, “No.”  They can’t possibly expect right-wing witch hunters to buy that.  Instead, it merely compounds the evidence of some sort of conspiratorial cover-up and the whole game starts again.  What people identify as a cultural liberal bias in the media is really attributable to arrogance and self-importance, a significant proportion of which derives from the tremendous wealth that inevitably accompanies media stardom.  The right-wing exploits that arrogance—which it terms “elitism”---attaches a phony “liberal” label to it, and proceeds to concoct a story about the SCLM [so-called liberal media] that bears almost no relationship to reality.  But it works and Dan Rather and CBS News have given it fresh new life.

And in light of Fineman's Spiro-Agnew-ish description of Walter Cronkite, this older comment (10/07/04) by Josh Marshall is particularly appropriate, a humorous reference to Lyndon Johnson saying that if they had "lost Cronkite" on the Vietnam War, they had lost the country:

Howard Fineman's new column is entitled, "Bush is beginning to sound desparate."

And if I were Bush, and I'd lost even Howard Fineman, I'd start  to feel desperate too.

To quote the Daily Howler for the upteenth time, if we didn't have a press corps like this, you couldn't invent them.  It's just astonishing what a supposedly respectable journalist like Fineman will sit down and type on his computer to be published.  Amazing.