Bet the oil companies thought $20/barrel oil would be a great outcome, too?

“Well that worked out well didn’t it?”

Just goes to show, Fran, that even the great Murdoch should stick to what he knows best; namely selling newspapers.

Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week.

Even the “Isrealis were kept home on 9-11″ crowd know which city the twin towers were in.

Japerz is wrong, the right wing nuttiness is qualitatively worse and has pwerful backers to boot. “The Base” are starting to look like space ship cultists after the space ship fails to arrive.

wars are almost always about resources – considering the ties between the administration and the oil business – almost everyone in that room owed their fortune to it – considering the rubbery justifications for the war, I think the assertion is entirely reasonable.

Murdoch backs ‘courageous’ Blair over Iraq
Tuesday February 11 2003

Rupert Murdoch has given his full backing to war, praising George Bush
as acting “morally” and “correctly” and describing Tony Blair as “full
of guts” for going out on a limb in his support for an attack on
Iraq.

{…}

He reiterated that the “greatest thing to come out of this [war]”
would be cheap oil, which he believes would benefit the world economy
more than any tax cut ever could

…

On the war Mr Murdoch was equally unequivocal.”We can’t back down now.
I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is
going to go on with it,” he said. “The fact is, a lot of the world can’t accept the idea that America is the one superpower in the world,” he added.

Mr Murdoch said the price of oil would be the war’s main benefit on
the world economy. “The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger
than any tax cut in the any country.”

Well that worked out well didn’t it?

I thought that was a very perceptive post, and I totally agree with you. But I don’t think we should allow a reasonable argument to stop us mocking republicans for their loony views and people – just think of the fun we would miss out on.

For my own part I also think that’s rather disrespectful of tribal traditions, which are highly diverse and don’t automatically equate to the most base biological instincts we still have lolling about in our brains.

And in timely fashion, a dailykos diary that makes the point more pertinently than I can (despite the lame title).

You seem to think I’m some sort of Republican, or right-winger, or GOP apologist. I’m not.

Incorrect. My memory of your political positions is more nuanced than you are prepared to acknowledge. I recall clearly and accept as true your statement that you are mostly a Democrat voter.

The “straight line” I referred to is about methodology, not ideology. Though it is true that the persons I mentioned inhabited various points of the right side of the spectrum.

In responding to my invitation above, you may interpret “left” as broadly as you like.

Ya can’t say fairer than that.

as a matter of interest, do you have folks over there who sincerely believe that ALL the nutters reside in the Party they themselves oppose? Or are such folks in tiny minorities?

Do you have (possibly other) folks who believe it’s valid to build large edifices of (sometimes “psychologising”) speculation as part of their political discourse?

How’s NYC this summer?

You seem to think I’m some sort of Republican, or right-winger, or GOP apologist. I’m not. Have voted Democrat the majority of the time, albeit with increasing exasperation and a sense of futility. If I had my druthers, I’d belong to the Boring, Slow-Moving, Very Careful Party, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist. I just think that politically, the best way to avoid unintended consequences is to have as few actual intentions as possible to begin with.

Back to the topic of the thread. Think of it like this: Confucius said that “The righteous man is not an instrument.” Well, the American MSM have been (and remain) Obama’s instrument, therefore whatever else they may be, they aren’t particularly righteous. If this has inspired a fair bit of mistrust of both Obama and the MSM which expresses in amusing ways, well it shouldn’t be too surprising. Sunlight, disinfectant, etc etc. The contrary applies as well.

Are there a bunch of right-wing nutters out there who think Obama was born in Kenya and smuggled into Hawaii or some kooky thing? I’m sure there are, just as there were a bunch of left-wing nutters who seemed to think that John McCain collaborated with his Vietnamese captors. Hell, I still remember the folks who thought the letters of Ronald Reagan’s name indicated 666, the Mark of the Beast. The poor, and the crazy, we have always with us.

There’s probably sort of a bell curve at work here: on one far end are the nutters, and on the other far end are the political operators who see a potential dividend in keeping this story afloat. In the middle are a bunch of folks who don’t pay all that much attention to politics (I know that for the denizens of a political blog this may be hard to fathom, but trust me, it’s true!), who think Obama smells a little weird and his past is sort of peculiar for an American president (which is objectively true), who don’t much believe what they read b/c they can see the MSM is in the tank, and who’ve heard there’s something fishy about his birth, but probably couldn’t say what exactly. My guess is that a fair amount of birther skepticism is just a condensation point for a general feeling of uneasiness with the guy, which he does little to dispel.

So what’s the actual upshot? Well, I reckon some people support BHO, and others don’t. Dog bites man. Same as it ever was.

working on the assumption that you’re genuinely ignorant of how the site works, I’ll explain it.

Moulitsas owns the site and along with a select team of contributors, they post articles to the front page. On the right hand bar are listings of diaries by people registered to the site. There’s a detailed FAQ about what is and isn’t allowed (eg 9/11 conspiracy theories aren’t allowed), but apart from that registered users can post anything they like, and their contribution is rated by other users.

To whit, the Palin-is-pregnant story came from one of the over 100,000 registered users, not Moulitsas or one of his contributing team. It was hosed down by the majority of the site pretty rapidly.

The site has many millions of hits a day / year etc. and so has generated quite a business. Moulitsas uses that money to, among other things, commission polling data from credible independent polling agencies. This is what Mark is referring to above.

Which is why saying something on Kos or commissioned by Kos isn’t credible – isn’t credible.

You imply that the Left is more or less equally implicated:

I quite agree with you that the deplorable state of tit-for-tat has roots aplenty in the GOP, but that’s never the whole story, or even most of it.

I invite you to justify this assertion by presenting your left-wing rogue’s gallery that is the equivalent of my right-wing rogue’s gallery in mendacity, access to power and irrationality.

James, you can’t imply a conspiracy spanning decades, involving literally thousands of scientists and academics (all greedily rubbing their hands together in anticpipation of their plain envelope “research grant” from BigGreen), and then complain when people call you a crank.

“Do you not think there are dollars to be made in the coming Green economy?”

Sure there is, but isn’t there a lot more dollars to be made and lost by interests heavily invested in the existing “brown” economy?

I wonder who has more clout.

revanchism should be beneath the dignity of true patriots

How about; “At this time of national reconciliation, let us never give succour an even break”? Or “Let us never never never doubt, what nobody is sure about”?
Shit, if this is going to be that kind of party, I’m going to stick my digression in the mashed potatoes.

You prefaced your comment at 102 with my remark about the failure of the MSM: I merely replied within your own parameters, and now you accuse me of being narrow. The truth hurts? When you get within ten miles of the truth, I’ll let you know whether its distant approach bothers my trick knee or not.

The argument here is not whatever you say it is. The question raised was what to make of “birther” polling. As I have a ringside seat, a rarity on this blog, and know the terrain from (as it were) birth, I thought I’d offer an analysis beyond the predictable They-are-teh-dumb-cracker-RRRRACISTs narrative so beloved of those who like their judgments with a triple helping of snap. I quite agree with you that the deplorable state of tit-for-tat has roots aplenty in the GOP, but that’s never the whole story, or even most of it. And besides, revanchism should be beneath the dignity of true patriots. I don’t doubt that BHO is ‘legally’ a ‘citizen’; it’s the other stuff I have my doubts about.

Back to you; film at 11.

There he goes again, looking for the truth under the street light because it’s too dark everywhere else.

Since when was this thread solely about the MSM?

This thread is about how lies, mendacity and irrationality became a staple of American public life. The forces of darkness I nominated above (by no means an exhaustive list) enlisted elements of the MSM in their conspiracies against the truth. Ever heard of Fox News? Walter Winchell? Freda Utley?

Thanks for avoiding the argument. That is prima facie evidence that the truth hurts.