It was a week to boggle the mind, a week to make history — a week, in short, to totally fuck up year-in-review roundups. Forget politics stopping at the water’s edge; the principle that was truly upended this past week is that no real news should occur between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2. Then again, the last week in the news really was the year in the news, what with the simultaneous climaxes of the impeachment story and the bombing of — oh, you know, that luminous green country with no people in it. Why bother rounding up 1998? We spent a year there last week.

The same holds for the year’s media news: Its issues and trends were captured in miniature in the overstressed news coverage of the last few days. You want the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1998/10/13poni.html">influence of the Web on old media? Look at the cable-news networks, which — cramming frames within frames to keep both war and Washington on air — needed only a hit counter and a few bootleg Simpsons gifs to look like poorly designed home pages circa 1995. You want advertorial innovation? No sooner had the military named its assault on — it was someplace in the Middle East, right? — than Fox News Channel tastefully whipped up the logo “Desert FOX,” the latter word in massive gold type, inaugurating the first product placement in a U.S. military adventure. (Might we suggest “The Samsung Korean War II”?) You want reality television? Look at the nose-cone bombing footage that the Pentagon trotted out and feel the pride of living in a country that installs TV cameras even on its weapons. America does not rip your heart out and show it to you before you die; America rips your heart out and puts it on CNN.

But above all, the week proved that there was only one story this year, when impeachment won the airwaves from the hostilities in — Iran! That’s it! (All this proving how silly the “Wag the Dog” postulate was. If President Clinton believed a remote-controlled war against a group of swarthy third worlders would distract Americans for more than half an hour, he wouldn’t have had the brains to get elected in the first place.) It’s only a shame McGwire didn’t end up on Time’s cover, not because “he let us finally feel good about ourselves again” (from last year’s Mars mission back through Cal Ripken Jr., the first Gulf War and beyond, America never really stops finally feeling good about itself again), but because he proved that no subject — from war to the economy to baseball — was too important, exciting or irrelevant to be brought into the tedious embrace of the Story of the Year.

Or Stories of the Year, for that story broke down into two identifiable but not inseparable parts: the Monica story (the sex, the thong, the Altoids) and the legal-political story (the subpoenas, the leaks, the hearings). The highfalutin J-school critique of the media’s performance in 1998 is that while the press admirably covered the legal-political story, which after all involved the potential removal of the chief executive, it was out of line on the sex story, which after all was just a tawdry tale about the president having an affair with a 22-year-old.

But the argument on the Monica story is wrong, and here’s why: It was a tawdry tale about the president having an affair with a 22-year-old. God save our frigid, dead souls the day we fail to get a kick out of news like that. As much as the respectable media liked to tut-tut over the public discourse taking place in the late-night monologues, that was exactly where this story belonged. The legal-political story is the one that really wearied us, and it was, sadly, out of the scandalmongers’ control.

That hasn’t stopped the popular perception that it was scandalmongering that brought us to this pass, though. Sarah Kerr, in a Slate dialogue last week, implied that the media have pruriently stretched out the story: “Take the example of what’s happening this week with the prez. In undeniable ways, the media seem more powerful than ever, more driven to dress up the news as entertainment no matter what the destructive cost. But the public annoyance with this circus shows that though we may not be able to control the entertainment, we’re getting better at tuning it out.”

This “destructive … circus” charge is the standard line by now: the press as troupe of evil clowns, spritzing the foul seltzer of scandal at its helpless audience over and over again. By slavering over scandal, it kept the story alive and buried the president. What this argument misses — and we saw this in the pointless speculations this year on whether public opinion would affect Ken Starr — is that the law doesn’t give a crap whether you pay attention to it or not. In fact, to the extent that it did go crazy over the sex aspects of the story, the press perversely became Clinton’s best friend, unintentionally putting it in a ludicrous perspective that served him best. It flatters journalists to believe that the public hates only those bad apples peddling sensation, that it would approve of us if only we would take our jobs seriously, but really — as Michael Wolff’s “Impeach the Media” poll analysis in New York magazine last month showed — the more we took the story gravely, hand-wringingly seriously, the more the public sickened of it, and us.

We had it all figured out after 1997, didn’t we? After Diana and the paparazzi, we decided the greatest problem in the media was the sleaze-hungry tabloid press. Then 1998 came along and showed us that the tabloid press may be the most responsible institution the country has. At least, in its single-minded attention to novelty and shock, it shows a simple wisdom lacking in our more responsible institutions this year: You gorge on a juicy story until you vomit, then you move on. Remember how the first few weeks of the Lewinsky story — the period truly driven by salacious excitement — was decried as a low point in the tabloidization of the media? Today it looks like a Periclean golden age compared with the sclerotic “It’s just about sex/No it’s not” dialogue that followed: If it started as a feeding frenzy, it lived on as a grim prison cafeteria line. If only the Lewinsky story were cynically driven by entertainment values — it would have died by April.

It is only appropriate, then, that the only genuine, unscripted moments in the news this past week were prompted by Larry Flynt, whose Hustler magazine launched the congressional-sex investigation that prompted Bob Livingston’s resignation as speaker-designate. Likewise, toe-sucker Dick Morris is probably the most egregious wise-man apotheosis on talk TV, but amid last week’s “Wag the Dog” flurry he was a comparative voice of reason, appearing on Fox and nailing the hypocrisy, given their Gulf War track records, of both the Republicans’ loose-cannon attacks and the Democrats’ shut-up-and-support-the-troops rhetoric. Morris may be an unprincipled sleaze, but the great thing about sleaze at a time of dazzling, universal hypocrisy is that it’s nonpartisan: The only thing it’s against is cheap sanctimony. Indeed, when — if — this story ends, the most lasting changes in our politics may have been wrought by the tabloid sex wallowers, who, by performing a sort of aversion therapy on the public, have done more than the intelligentsia to ensure that adulterers can now proudly run for office.

The responsible media, on the other hand, managed to take what should have been a perfectly thrilling wallow in bodily fluids and turn it into a joyless, vengeful, href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/23list.html">yearlong kick in the ass. As 1998 commenced we resolved to reap the lessons of 1997, and we reaped them good and hard. We grew up and got serious; we started the year href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/col_weav.html">unzipped, we ended it href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/media_eric.html">unspun. As we finish up the holiday season and get ready to party like it’s 1868, does anyone out there feel better off for it?

“If there’s a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I’ve never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.”

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country — a breach of the political boundaries of “traditional journalism” that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

Nevertheless, it is true that Barnes has enjoyed greater credibility than other journalists on the partisan right throughout his career. After all, he is a former reporter for such publications as the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the New Republic. He was once a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and served as one of three panelists for the first nationally televised debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Now, however, there is further evidence that Barnes not only routinely helped Republicans raise money as a banquet speaker, but accepted tens of thousands of dollars from party organizations as well:

• In February 2006, Barnes was paid $10,000 plus travel expenses by Oregon’s Lane County Republican Central Committee to deliver the keynote address at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. (Thanks to Carla Axtman for research assistance.) These payments, recorded in filings with the Oregon secretary of state, were evidently made through the Premier Speakers Bureau of Franklin, Tenn., which represents other Fox personalities including Sean Hannity, Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee. Barnes is no longer listed on the Premier website, but the company did not respond to phone or e-mail inquiries about its relationship with him.

• In February 2007, Barnes spoke at the annual  Lincoln-Reagan Dinner held by the Republican Party of Fort Bend County, Texas — home of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who purchased a ticket to the event. The party organization’s filing with the Texas Ethics Commission shows two payments of $5,000 each on April 26, 2007, to Premiere Speakers Bureau (with the notation “LRD 2007 Speaker – Fred Barnes”) and travel expenses of $1,823. Photos of a smiling Barnes with various local dignitaries at the event, which netted a reported $70,000 for the party, can be viewed  here.

• In early March 2008, Barnes served as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County at its annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Whether he received the customary $10,000 is not clear because the party’s  filing with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections show only a single payment of $5,500 to Premiere Speakers Bureau on Feb. 18. The committee reported net $120,000 in net proceeds from the event.

Barnes didn’t return a call seeking comment. Neither did a Fox News spokeswoman. The question they avoided answering is whether accepting money from party organizations is appropriate for any political journalist, and whether such payments fall within the ethical guidelines of Fox News. Whatever Fox might say, the Murdoch network’s  long history of excessive coziness with Republican politicians and organizations offers little reassurance.

I hoped to ask Barnes whether he agrees that being on the team payroll means he is indeed “on the team” — the Republican Party team. Understandably, he may prefer not to respond. But he ought to reflect on his standing to criticize the behavior of other journalists, left or right, before he mounts his high horse again.

Exactly what is so disturbing about the Upper West Side? As Joan Walsh notes, it is a place renowned as liberal in politics, Jewish in ethnicity, and therefore, according to Kyl’s implication, foreign to the nation’s heartland. Never mind that some of the greatest American authors, musicians, actors and artists — including very many who happened not to be Jews — lived and worked in that special slice of urban landscape over the past century or so, including Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Humphrey Bogart, Harry Belafonte and George M. Cohan, an Irish Catholic who won the Congressional Gold Medal in 1936 for composing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” among other achievements. (Rush Limbaugh used to live there, too. And Joe Scarborough says he “loves” living there with his family today.)

Beyond the narrow and ignorant parochialism of such remarks by Kyl and others, what is most galling is their absolute phoniness. Scarcely anyone on the Republican right ever suggests that Weekly Standard editor William Kristol ought to shut up because he was raised on the un-American Upper West Side, a few blocks from Ms. Kagan. Anyone who does so is rightly rebuked for appealing to prejudice. Are Kristol and all the other neoconservatives who have inhabited that neighborhood, beginning with those named Podhoretz, to be tarred as “un-American” too? In May, Commentary editor John Podhoretz published a timely, quasi-nostalgic essay about his family’s half-century in the neighborhood, candidly dismissing the right-wing stereotypes:

Conservatives sometimes invoke the Upper West Side in their lists of petri-dish-like leftist enclaves along with Cambridge and Berkeley, but despite its homogeneous radicalism, it didn’t then and doesn’t now offer much in the way of interesting, unexpected, or comical ideological excess.

Podhoretz goes on to mention that it was anything but sociologically monolithic or elite:

It might have been the most integrated area in the United States. According to a 1966 study, out of 150,000 residents, 105,000 were white (of whom 40,000 were Jews); 26,000 came from Spanish-speaking homes; and 18,000 were black. “Only in Honolulu,” wrote the journalist Joseph P. Lyford, “is there a greater confusion of blood, ancestry, language, and culture in as small a space.” But though there were racial and ethnic tensions aplenty, and these would grow exponentially as the years passed, the division in the neighborhood was primarily one of class — a division between the middle class and the lower class. (There weren’t many rich people on the Upper West Side then, a situation much altered today.)

Let’s not forget Dick Morris, cousin of Roy Cohn and Upper West Side native, who earned his political spurs in the neighborhood’s Democratic clubhouses. Will Fox News dump the voice of Fox Nation as an Upper West Sider and potential crypto-socialist? Of course not. He’s a Republican now, and those nasty ethnogeographical snarks are reserved for Democrats only.

The spurious resentments encouraged by Republicans only begin with Kagan’s home turf. Moving on to her legal education, they sought to demean the memory of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked — and for whom she expresses unreserved admiration, despite the fact that he called her “Shorty.” The late justice was best known for his life’s work ending legal discrimination in America, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down “separate but equal” education in public schools. This is a topic that Republicans might wish to avoid, considering their recent embarrassment when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul started a debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its violation of his “freedom” to discriminate in public accommodations. But Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, along with several of his colleagues, could not resist a gratuitous assault on Marshall as a “judicial activist.”

Coming from Sessions, this sounded like a dog-whistle appeal to segregationist nostalgia. But even if that isn’t what he meant, the “activism” complaint is bogus. Republicans endorse activist decisions whenever they like the result. The most notorious example is still Bush v. Gore, but the current Supreme Court majority is just as eager to overturn precedent and engineer society from the bench, as they proved this year in the Citizens United decision. Reversing more than a century of the jurisprudence that upheld congressional authority to regulate corporate political speech, the conservative justices overturned basic precedent to make a sweeping and ominous change in law. Indeed they seized an opportunity to venture far beyond the issues at hand in that case to free corporations from any restriction and corrupt our politics even further.

How did Chief Justice John Roberts justify that outrage, after repeatedly and falsely promising during his nomination hearings to respect precedent? He cited Brown v. Board of Ed, writing that had the court observed precedent in 1954, “segregation would be legal.” Many legal scholars would quarrel with that claim, but the point is plain enough: Activism is fine, as long as we like the outcome.

It is probably a forlorn hope, but before these hearings conclude the Republicans should stop pandering to their dimmest constituencies and instead try to elicit the actual views of this accomplished American woman, who is almost certain to join the high court next fall.

Such hysterics must be expected from every carnival barker in Fox Nation, especially a featured player like Morris – and the shrill rhetoric surely helps to separate the rubes from their money, in this case through donations to the League of American Voters, sponsor of this morning’s e-mail and many more from him.

Scamming aside, however, a prediction is a prediction, and Democratic legislators preparing to vote yea on reform should be comforted whenever Morris prognosticates their demise, because he is dead wrong with almost perfect consistency.

Only two months ago, following the election of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election, the excitable Morris looked into his crystal ball and  told Fox listeners that he had seen the effective end of Obama’s presidency. “Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts … ultimately, this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed,” he pronounced. (Which must mean that the healthcare bill is almost certain to pass next weekend.)

During the 2008 election cycle, Morris offered many forecasts, none of which were right. Early on he picked Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani as almost certain nominees of their respective parties and trashed John McCain as a sure loser. In January 2007, he told an audience of conservative journalists: “I think what’s going to happen in the world is that Hillary’s going to be the next president.” Not too long after that, he and wife Eileen McGann wrote a column for the New York Post headlined “It’s Now a Rudy Romp.” A year later, he was predicting that Clinton would crash and burn in the New Hampshire primary, right up to the evening before that election. Her tears had proved to voters that she was unfit to serve as president, he explained. When she won the following night, he overreacted again by predicting that she would surely go on to secure the nomination. (Back when Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate from New York in the 2000 cycle, Morris similarly made one delusional prediction after another, claiming that she would never run, withdraw, falter, lose, and so on. She ran and won, of course.)

Among Dick’s wackiest blunders in recent years was his confident assertion — on the eve of the 2006 midterm election — that North Korea would become the overriding issue in that campaign, eclipsing taxes, the war in Iraq, and Republican corruption. As Glenn Greenwald observed back then in a mordant post: “It’s just not possible to be more wrong than this.”

By Election Day, Dick had forgotten about North Korea and could no longer ignore the unanimity of polls showing that the Republicans were on the verge of a historic defeat. (He occasionally gets it right, if he waits until moments before the polls close to place his bet.)

Part of Dick’s problem, in the years since he sold out completely to the Republicans, is his irrepressible urge to spin rather than analyze. This has led him to some fantastically stupid conjectures, captured on video. One of my favorites came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when President Dubya made a desultory speech in New Orleans.

On Fox News, Morris rated the weak speech as “fantastic!” Building up a head of steam, he cruelly raised Republican hopes. “The people who said this storm is going to hurt Bush’s presidency,” he declared, “are just wrong.” Defying polls that showed the president’s public approval scraping bottom, he went on to assure listeners that the Katrina fiasco would be nothing more than “a distant memory,” while the city’s recovery would prove to be “a huge positive for Bush. That will be a second term legacy … [Bush] can get all the money he wants out of Congress ’cause of this disaster, the people will be solidly behind him, the media will cover it like crazy and he’s gonna look like Santa Claus.”

Obviously he pulls a lot of these prognostications straight out of his butt, with no polling or expertise required. Certainly there are plenty of polls showing that the Democrats will face serious trouble come fall (although there are also surveys showing a hint of daylight now, too). But when someone like Morris warns of catastrophe, there just may be reason for optimism. 

Fortunately for Romney, the good news is very good: Given Morris’ recent history of prognostication, it’s probably best to now consider Romney the front-runner for the nomination, if not a lock to win in the general.

Most people have probably forgotten by now — or, at least, that’s probably what Morris is hoping — but the former strategist for Bill Clinton turned professional Clinton-hater was the author of a book, published in 2005, titled “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.” In it, he and his wife, Eileen McGann, wrote:

[A]s of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 presidential election ….

But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza “Condi” Rice.