Mitt Romney yesterday had a “private” (well-publicized) meeting with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that was a pretty obvious attempt by Romney to win the for-some-reason “coveted” Bloomberg endorsement. Mayor Bloomberg is not actually the hugely popular and universally respected national figure that anti-partisanship zealot pundits think he is — only around 20 percent of Americans viewed him favorably in 2010, and a 2011 poll says he’d get a mere 10 percent of the vote in a three-way presidential race — but those anti-partisanship zealots represent an important constituency of “rich people who run the media,” so a Bloomberg endorsement would be a strong signal that Romney is moderate and wise and prudent and so on.
The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.
But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.
“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”
I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.
In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.
The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.
The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!
The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.
You may know Richard Grenell as the Romney “foreign policy spokesman” who had a history of writing dickish things — mainly sexist “jokes” — on Twitter. He has resigned, Jennifer Rubin reports, from the Romney campaign. Not because he didn’t have the sense not to post his offensive jokes about Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow in a public venue to begin with, or because he then stupidly attempted to scrub his Twitter history after everyone had already seen the posts, but because he is gay, and that grossed out a bunch of creepy right-wingers.
Grenell, as I said, was a foreign policy spokesman, and so therefore the fact that he’s openly gay would seem to have precisely nothing whatsoever to do with his job. He was not going to be advising Romney on domestic policy, let alone on social issues. But his icky gayness was too much for certain prominent conservative media figures, and Grenell was targeted by culture warrior religious right wackos like Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. He was also the subject of some debate at the National Review Online. Kevin D. Williamson began it with a post that is hilarious in hindsight, in which he says that it’s no big deal, at all, that the Romney campaign had hired an openly gay man. “I can only guess what anybody thinks the relevance of Mr. Grenell’s sex life is to the Romney team’s foreign-policy stance,” he wrote.
Matthew J. Franck, “Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey,” quickly explained it for Williamson. The basic argument was, no, you don’t get it, he’s really, really gay.
I agree that Grenell’s being openly gay is, in itself, of no consequence for his service in the Romney campaign. Nor is the fact that he supports same-sex marriage — if, that is, we were assured that this view would have no influence on American foreign policy. But Grenell has made a particular crusade of the marriage issue, with a kind of unhinged devotion that suggests a man with questionable judgment. And when the Obama State Department is already moving to elevate the gay-rights agenda to a higher plane than religious freedom in the foreign policy of the United States, it is reasonable to wonder whether Grenell, after taking such a prominent place in the Romney campaign’s foreign-policy shop, would be in line for an influential State posting where he could pursue his passion for that same agenda.
Plus, Franck reports, Grenell wrote something for “the local gay paper” and he said something about gays winning support for “their political issues,” which means he is part of the homosexualist agenda!
Williamson responded with some long-winded sarcasm mixed with a bit of crankery about how marriage has been debased by democracy, and Franck returned the volley with more ominous warnings about Grenell’s scary gay gayness. “It seems pretty plain,” Franck says, “that, whatever fine record he compiled in the Bush administration, Grenell is more passionate about same-sex marriage than anything else.” It doesn’t seem so, actually, but Franck goes on to imagine Grenell jumping ship for the Obama campaign regardless. Because you can’t trust those homosexuals.
This bullshit led Grenell to resign, which fervent Romney supporter and non-gay-hater Jennifer Rubin is sad about.
Grenell’s statement:
I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.
I’m really not sure how “clear” that message was, considering that they didn’t actually push back against the crazies, at all.
Gay activists who seek to shame prominent gay Republicans have won a powerful new ally: The Republican Party!
Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!
Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)
The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.
In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.
(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)
Bob Woodward is maybe the most famous reporter in the world, entirely because of the criminality — and staggering incompetence — of Richard Nixon and his cronies. Woodward and his (more lovable) partner Carl Bernstein are the official “reporters who broke Watergate,” because while many other reporters working for numerous other publications did Watergate reporting that was, arguably, just as revelatory and important, Woodward and Bernstein wrote The Book that became The Movie, establishing them forever as legends of investigative journalism. It didn’t hurt that their narrative of their own investigation into Watergate was so cinematic and thrilling — code names and secret spy signals for sources! — and that Woodward followed up that early success by eventually becoming a sort of semi-official Court Reporter of Washington Presidencies.
His reputation is built on his Watergate reporting, and so he has been very defensive about his Watergate reporting. New York magazine this week has an excerpt from a book by Jeff Himmelman in which Himmelman, working from the personal archives of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, catches “Woodstein” in a bit of misdirection about a source in “All the President’s Men,” and then makes Woodward extremely uncomfortable about the veracity of some of the book’s other claims.
The main point of contention is a woman Woodward and Bernstien refer to as “Z.” “Z” only features on a few pages of the book, but Woodward said in 1976 that she had provided vitally important leads. The book also says, and Woodward and Bernstein both always insisted, that no members of the Watergate grand jury agreed to speak to the reporters, even after they received permission from Bradlee to skirt the law and attempt to contact them. But “Z,” it turns out, was a grand juror. It says so plainly in a memo, apparently typed by Bernstein, found in Bradlee’s old files.
The reporters carefully hid any indication in the book that “Z” was a grand juror. They claim they did so to protect her identity, but of course it had the ancillary benefit of not revealing that they themselves may have violated the law. Bernstein is a little more sanguine about this revelation than Woodward:
When I had a conference call with Carl and Bob last week to ask them to comment on Z’s identity, they conceded that she was a grand juror, but insisted that Carl hadn’t known it when he first went to visit her and said they’d disguised her only to protect their source. They said they’d long since forgotten the episode. “This is a footnote to a footnote,” Bob protested. But perhaps the most telling moment had occurred when I reached Carl on his own, earlier that day. Right before we hung up, he had said, wryly, “Maybe they’ll send us to jail after all.”
The two wrote a response to Himmelman that New York magazine has also printed, in which they claim that they forgot “Z” was a member of the grand jury, and dismiss her contribution to their reporting as minimal. She didn’t break major news to them, but in the book she serves as very good atmosphere — there is an offhand reference to “her boss” that leaves the reader assuming she works in the upper reaches of the government, for example — and it is that book’s atmosphere that makes it so readable and thrilling. It is also that book’s atmosphere — the hazy subterfuge and paranoia and midnight meetings and veiled threats — that Bradlee himself found a bit suspicious, according to a 1990 interview Himmerlman found:
Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Ben told Barbara.
Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.
The rest of the New York excerpt deals with Woodward’s hysterically defensive response to reading this quote. He does everything he can to stop Himmelman from printing it, including outright begging. Bradlee never says outright that he suspects Woodward of sexing up his story, but he never denies it as a possibility. This enrages Woodward. And Woodward is still mad, and he is making the media rounds to make sure everyone knows that he is mad.
He is sending the Post transcriptions of interviews between Bradlee and Himmelman (how did he get them?) in which Bradlee says he doesn’t think Woodward “embellished,” but one can not think he embellished while still allowing that it’s possible he did.
Woodward is overreacting ferociously, perhaps because he fears for his legacy. The revelation of the identity of Deep Throat made it quite easy to see when Woodward had lied to throw people off the trail. (W. Mark Felt, notably, quit smoking 30 years before he met Bob Woodward, who referred to Deep Throat as a heavy smoker.) And Woodward had protected Deep Throat as a source not solely to shield the brave whistle-blower from retribution, but in part so that he wouldn’t have to reveal that his anonymous source had blabbed because he was pissed at not getting a promotion.
We now all know, in other words, that Bob Woodward is a sketchy reporter. This has always been the case. All of his post-Watergate books feature ridiculous, clearly invented (or “embellished”) internal monologues, and re-creations, with quotation marks, of scenes he couldn’t have witnessed or recorded. He is shady about his sources, even to his editors, and because he is so well-sourced, he is always sitting on important information that he refuses to divulge, to protect his powerful sources. His depressing flailing about the periphery of the Plame affair — Woodward was the first journalist to learn that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, and Woodward declined to mention his knowledge to his bosses or anyone else for months after the story broke, for fear of getting subpoenaed — was proof that his balancing of his responsibility to the public and his responsibility to his sources had become, or perhaps always was, severely out of whack.
I think that Woodward has enjoyed a lack of critical attention for years now, as he’s basked in the glow of his staggering professional success, and he is terrified that he’ll be remembered not as the greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century, but instead as the ultimate reporter as pawn of the truly powerful.
Every year the White House Correspondents’ Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn’t, really. The majority membership of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is a much better example of how awful and broken our democracy is. The Washington Post editorial page better illustrates how worthless and co-opted our establishment press is. Yes, it’s an event where vile war criminals like Henry Kissinger are feted and celebrated, but you know where else vile war criminals like Henry Kissinger are celebrated? Literally everywhere they go. The Correspondents’ Dinner is just an awkward roast preceded and followed by depressing parties.
The evening is a result of the fact, feature or bug, that our nation’s capital is located well outside our nation’s media, entertainment and financial capitals, forcing those who call the political capital home and consider themselves terribly important to prove their importance by tricking actual famous and important people into attending a party much lamer than a random Wednesday night back where they live. It’s an anachronistic celebratory dinner for the D.C. political journalism industry that became a TV event, or pseudo-event, completely disconnected from journalism. (The journalists don’t even go to the dinner. No media outlet would waste an expensive seat on a measly reporter.)
They call it Nerd Prom, which is not remotely accurate. Political journalists, socially inept or no, are not nerds. Most of them can’t do math, a fact that campaigns and politicians regularly exploit.
This year, the president delivered some funny jokes about how he once ate a dog. He killed. (Do other democracies do this? I’m honestly asking. Does Australia’s PM have to deliver a stand-up routine to a frigid crowd of media executives and Australian soap opera stars once a year?) Jimmy Kimmel, the professional entertainment, did his best with pretty good material and a cold crowd. (The crowd always fawns over the president’s routine and nearly always greets the professional comedian with stony silence, because the comedian is an interloper. This is part of what happened to Stephen Colbert in 2006.) There are people who are thrilled that the comedian made jokes about the president and people who are mad that the comedian didn’t make enough jokes about the president.
Then came the after parties, which are why people in Washington actually get excited for this thing. The bit you see on TV doesn’t actually matter, to anyone. The only reason anyone rents a tux is for open bars and chances to look or maybe even talk to famous people. The Bloomberg Party and the Vanity Fair Party helpfully merged a while back, making that the party for officially important people to brag about getting into. Even if you, professionally, hate politics and politicians and think D.C. should be blasted off the face of the earth or at least paved over and replaced with a giant toll road to a charter school, it is fun to see famous people and drink drinks. (And R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens, that bomb-throwing iconoclast who always held the hippest party of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.)
Michael Dolan wrote a very early version of the gimlet-eyed take on the dinner and the scene that surrounds it, in a 1992 Washington City Paper story that Jack Shafer recently republished at his site. The dinner was in the midst of morphing from a sort of private little party for the D.C. media elite to cozy up with sources into the vaguely national television event it is today:
For years, the crowd consisted mainly of faces known only to those who covered them, but that has changed with the infusion of massive amounts of celebriticity. In the mid-’80s, newsrooms with a self-promotional bent began pitching correspondents’ dinner invites at folks with no association to the news except a desire to be in it.
Now that’s what everyone does. Greta Van Susteren this year invited Lindsay Lohan and Fox News itself invited Kim Kardashian, as if to prove just how much contempt they have for all of us. The New Yorker has lately begun inviting celebrities who straddle the line between hip and overexposed. (Last year: Jon Hamm, Zach Galifianakis, the Coen brothers. This year: Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, Jason Schwartzman and Aziz Ansari.) The New York Times has wisely avoided the dinner since 2007.
The celebrity invitee arms race is the most degrading element of the entire spectacle. C-SPAN’s valiant attempt to serve the public by holding a camera up to Washington once again had the unintended consequence of making Washington even more insufferable.
It would probably save everyone a lot of embarrassment if they just canceled the damn thing forever, but then Washington reporters would never have a chance to be in the same room as George Clooney, and that is really what gets them up in the morning.
Did you hear about the new law in Egypt that the Muslim Brotherhood supported that allowed people to have sex with dead women? It was on all the blogs yesterday. “Hard to come up with a more apt image of the Arab Spring than an aroused Islamist rogering a corpse,” wrote Mark Steyn. It’s hard to come up with a more apt image of the state of contemporary Islamophobia than Mark Steyn furiously pondering the image of “an aroused Islamist rogering a corpse.”
So, it’s not a real thing. There’s no such law or even any evidence that anyone proposed said law, and even if someone had proposed such a law, there is not even a remote possibility that the Egyptian Parliament would consider it. It’s total bullshit. It’s the Daily Mail overhyping a story Al-Arabiya took from a newspaper opinion column written by a dedicated Hosni Mubarak supporter.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy explained as much yesterday, but the people who highlight specious stories like this don’t actually care about “accuracy”; they are just engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to tar all Muslims as violent radical pervert monsters who are slowly taking over the West.
That is actually not the case, and anyone who’s ever met a Muslim could probably tell you!
It’s important to remember that the structure of the Muslim clergy is, by and large, like that of a number of Protestant Christian sects. Anyone can put out a shingle and declare themselves a preacher. The ones to pay attention to are the ones with large followings, or attachment to major institutions of Islamic learning. The preacher in Morocco is like the preacher in Florida who spent so much time and energy publicizing the burning of Qurans.
This seems like a really staggeringly obvious point — there are mainstream Muslim clerics and nutty fringe ones, just like in Mormonism and Judaism and all forms of Christianity! — but the Islamophobia industry has spent years trying to make sure that Americans by and large don’t understand this.
Number 2: That Obama EPA person said they were going to “crucify” the oil industry. This is a much bigger story (though it is still limited almost entirely to the conservative press) because it was first spread by an actual senator: James Inhofe, the Senate’s worst pilot and best friend of oil and gas. And then it was on Fox, obviously.
And it has now become a regular talking point, that Obama’s EPA is “crucifying” oil companies. (Which is bad because oil companies give us our precious life-giving oil!)
Of course the guy, an administrator named Al Armendariz, was specifically talking about going after companies that broke the law. The idea is that the EPA would punish companies that violated the law, because that is the EPA’s whole deal. (Some people think there shouldn’t be any environmental laws and no EPA, but instead of making that argument, they are instead making the untrue claim, based on words taken out of context, that Obama’s EPA is unfairly punishing all oil companies for no reason.)
It is also sort of weird that everyone thinks it’s a political winner to say Obama is being too tough on oil companies when no one likes oil companies, but what do I know.
Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama (Credit: AP) 
Richard Grennell 
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan) 
Bob Woodward (Credit: Reuters) 
President Barack Obama high-fives Jimmy Kimmel as Caren Bohan, a Reuters journalist and president of the White House Correspondents' Association, looks on, Saturday, April 28, 2012(Credit: AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari) 
The (now updated) Daily Mail story that launched the necrophilia myth (Credit: Daily Mail) 