Where have you gone, Judith Miller?

Katharine Q. Seelye, who is to the Times' election coverage what Judith Miller was to that paper's cheerleading for George Bush's invasion of Iraq, bursts forth on the front page today with the kind of vapid thumb-sucker we expect from an honorary member of what David Foster Wallace, in his coverage of John McCain's 2000 Republican primary campaign, called the Twelve Monkeys.


They are, and this I know to be true because I once worked with some of them:

"so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal – twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxforcloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100 percent buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus a uniform of self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every . . . "

Well, you get the idea. They are the eminently serious people who manage the nation's discourse on all things political, and their "objectivity" is their most treasured asset because it allows them to exist in a universe where nothing, literally, matters because no matter how rotten the situation becomes they will go home to their trust funds and their Hallmark Movie family gatherings at the holidays and continue to turn up their noses at anything that doesn't fit their definition of reasonable, balanced and appropriate. It is this determination to be "even-minded" that produced the greatest assault on the Power of the Press we have witnessed in this lifetime, namely the Obsession with False Equivalencies that creates an environment in which it not only is entertaining to see David Gregory hamming it up on stage with Karl Rove, a black-hearted scoundrel who would no doubt seek to outlaw the press if he ever loses the knack of getting that mean old watchdog to roll over and get its tummy rubbed, but gives us tripe of the flavor Seelye today provides.


Some background is in order. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote an informative and typically engaging article about the Republican Party's efforts to infiltrate and co-opt the Tea Party movement, which was veering dangerously close to the cliff when it came to saying things like "throw ALL the bums out." The Tea Party's favorite in Delaware, a state that we mercifully don't much have to acknowledge, is a grifter named Christine O'Donnell, who lies about her academic achievements, doesn't pay her taxes, mismanages her finances in spectacular form, and apparently screwed and drank her way through several years of attempted college before finding the Lord and dedicating her life to speaking out against self-gratification.


It was natural then that in a universe that gives us Bristol Palin as the poster girl for Just Saying No to premarital sex, our gal in Delaware would attract the attention of Bristol's mother, aka Bible Spice, Caribou Barbie, etc., who anointed her the Chosen won. And guess what? She won the Republican primary over a mainstream opponent who by all accounts has never once taken a public stand on masturbation, or had a witch doctor at his church drive off the demons that kept him from using -- with a clear conscience -- his elected position to enrich himself. Nor has he admitted, as O'Donnell has, "dabbling" in witchcraft.


On the day after the primary win, Karl Rove, who is presently supervising a MAJOR behind-the-scenes effort to hand the Democrats their hats in next month's midterm elections, made unkind statements about Sarah's selection. From Politico:

"Karl Rove sounded a depressing tone for Republicans late Tuesday night, warning that surprise Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell has said “nutty things” and has ruined the party’s chances of winning the seat.

“I’ve met her. I wasn’t frankly impressed by her abilities as a candidate,” Rove said during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “One thing that O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election that she didn't in the primary is her own checkered background.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42205.html#ixzz11OVNCxzc

But a couple of phone calls set Karl on the right path, and he stopped dissing the person who could deliver a Senate majority to his side. A similar think happened in Kentucky.


Taibbi focuses his analysis on the Republican mainstream's efforts to rein in Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, who defeated the establishment candidate in a state that thinks, apparently, that Social Security is a socialist plot and that Medicare should be cut except, as Paul has noted, when it has an effect on the money he makes practicing medicine.


His message is condensed in the following excerpt from an article I would love to see discussed on the evening news shows, or maybe even referenced in the kind of thumb-suckers the Times runs:

"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake."

It's that refusal to reference, or even acknowledge the existence of, that so frustrates your faithful, nearly frothing, correspondent.


You and I both know good and damn well that Katharine Q. Seeleye, whatever else she might have done to prepare for her front-page feature on the "softening" of Rand Paul's message, was aware of Matt Taibbi's story. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that her very assignment was predicated on the publicity surrounding the Rolling Stone article. Nothing in Seelye's piece would give anyone a clue that she didn't think the whole thing up by herself, just by being a careful observer of Dr. Paul on the campaign trail and a careful collector of obscure accounts of his previous statements.


What is more unforgivable is that she casts her story in a completely different light than Taibbi has previously shown us. We are surely witnessing the Tea Party being devoured by one of the great political strategists of our age, dressed up like a populist so it can ride to the rescue of the billionaires who are pouring millions – hat tip to the Supreme Court for its continued efforts to make corporations just regular citizens like the unemployed and soon to be laid-off and otherwise prosperous among us – into campaigns to elect stooges that will help those powerful interests continue their dismantling of the Middle Class in America.


But saying something like that would be too extreme for the Twelve Monkeys. So they just give us nice, dull, complacent, balanced coverage like this:

"But Mr. DeMint’s smile may have vanished by morning. During a nationally televised debate on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Paul said that if he were elected to the Senate, he would support Senator Mitch McConnell, also from Kentucky, to keep his job as Republican leader.

Pressed to say whether he would choose him over Mr. DeMint, Mr. Paul said that he would vote for whomever Republicans chose as their leader and that he assumed it would be Mr. McConnell.

It was one more sign that no matter how devoted Mr. Paul is to Tea Party principles, he may be forced to yield periodically to some realities of the old-school politics that he denounces.

This also occurred last month, when Mr. McConnell set up a fund-raiser in Washington for Mr. Paul with several Republican senators who, like Mr. McConnell, had supported the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008; during the primary, Mr. Paul said he would not accept donations from anyone who had done so."

And trust that their readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a DFH rag like Rolling Stone to get the real picture.