We will lose in 2008. Reading Molly Ivins. . .

I was reading "Who Let the Dogs In" last night. It's a collection of her columns about politics.

One is a column written about 1 year into Clinton's presidency and the subject is how unfairly he was being treated by the press. He was talking about health care and all the press could talk about was how he wasn't doing anything to keep his promise to fix welfare. Molly compared the coverage Reagan and Bush I and Nixon got their first year in office and called foul. Clinton was being eaten alive LONG before Lewinsky and when Whitewater was on the back pages.

The last two weeks, and especially the last few days, all I've seen on the "news" is attacks on dem candidates. Think about it, except for Olbermann, have you seen the media go against any of the GOP candidates like they have against Biden and Hillary? I think Biden has a tin ear but I don't think what he said was worthy of HOURS on TV time espeically since these are not slow news days. And I think Hillary's joke was funny.

If this continues we will lose because our candidates are being crucified in the media just like Clinton was.

The only thing I can think of is to start screaming about it. Maybe in the "Internets" complain loudly and often it will break through. I say that because I think the media thinks it can do it because the right has convinced the world that our media is left leaning. Could we balance it out by making lots of noise on how it is exactly the opposite?

because they are scared of the media and won't stand up.

had a primary yet. As far as dems being scared of the media, I've seen a different democratic party in the last year or so, and a victorious one, have you forgotten the election last November?

Details please.

the media didn't go after anyone nationally except Allen and then it was because it was Internet driven.

I think WE need to help drive it. That's the lesson from November 2006. Maybe we can get them to talk about macacca.

Repug operatives scanned hours of tape to find a "gaffe" --

They knew exactly what Kerry was talking about (Bush is an idiot who got us stuck in Iraq).

They trumped up thier nonsense and push it out to cable news etc etc.

Again cable news knew what Kerry meant (Bush IS AN IDIOT)

But they focused 24/7 on it, letting the idiotic repug spin take front and center.

And funny, Kerry wasn't even running for anything.

We saw more than a few races where "local" issues simply
didn't matter as much as the (R) after a candidate's name.

The name Lincoln Chafee springs to mind- if ANY
Repub in the last 6 years was actually a decent,
honest public servant, it would be him. And he lost
because the 06 race was -NOT- just a bunch of Local & State
off-season elections, it was a National Referendum on
Repub rulership in general.

From sea to shining sea, the voting public stood up and said
they have had enough of the Repubs.

making short, intelligent points refuting the attacks. Also many newspapers ahve web sites with chat rooms. Again make intelligent points to refute these bozos.

The internet is changing things. There is a deeper level of awareness of what is going on. And then we have the Libby trial. Ah, yes, things are going to get very, very interesting and the repubs are going to pay dearly for it.

And it ain't just the Internet.

There's a change in the direction of the tide. There tens of thousands of Iraq veterans who are quickly finding out that all the goodness they were promised if they completed their tour(s) has evaporated. Severely injured vets without medical care. Jobless vets who can't seem to collect on their promised college education. Families of vets that have to deal with returned loved ones that are embittered, wounded and forever altered.

Add in another hundred thousand or so people displaced by Katrina. Where are they exactly? Some of them are still in camps. Some managed to assimilate into the communities that harbored them. How many are drifting from apartment to shelter to city to state?

Now, total that with the 70% of actual citizens that have had it with corruption, waste and this pointless war.

We aren't lost. The pendulum is always swinging. For the moment, it's swinging our way.

with almost two years to go is a just a tad premature.

how about putting as much positive information out there about ALL of them as possible?

We've spent more time here this week arguing about Edwards' new house and the Biden/Obama incident than we have fighting right wing evil.

We need to friggin' prioritize and quit the friggin' infighting - we can't afford it any more now than we could a few years ago, yet it seems to be getting worse.

Clinton was sandbagged by the press from the first day in office, his admin declared a total failure from the start. (To be fair, a comparison to Bush: he was getting it pretty bad and deservedly so in the summer of 2001, right up to 9/11.)

And at the same time it was Clinton's fault for not fighting back. The most serious omission, or rather indicator that nothing much was going to change, was the failure to release all the dirt he possibly could on the crimes of the Bushian Iran/Contra complex, and let the prosecutors do the work of putting these people behind bars.

I remember one of the first indicators of his strategy of weakness was that Powell stood up to him for the attempt to allow gays in the military, and Clinton backed down. There was a very important sentence he failed to say to Powell at the time - "General, as the elected civilian authority of a constitutional Republic, I hereby accept your resignation" - and it established the submissive posture of the Clinton administration with regard to right-wing attacks. The strategy, all too typical of Democrats, was built to keep the man in office, while sacrificing the political objectives the party supposedly supports.

Years later, at the climactic point in this relentless attack on Clinton the person (as imagined in the fevered love-hate of the conservative mind), he faced another choice of what to say. The self-respecting answer would have been, "My possible relations with consenting adults are not your business," and if nothing else it would have helped America grow up. Instead he uttered the words that led to his impeachment, almost deservedly so: not because they were a lie, but because they acknowledged the right of the press to poke its filthy nose in his crotch: "I did not have sex with that woman."

sucking up a lot of air on cable news. It is difficult to fight it. Letters to the editor is one idea. Pressuring print reporters to do exposes is good. CNN did good on Faux's "OBAMA IS A MUSLIM TERRORIST SCHOOL BOY" thing. (If only CNN had done the same kind of work on Swiftboats in '04, rather than sitting there dumbly letting them spread their lies)

Every time they have a chance to speak, they need to start a new meme along the lines of... "the media is only as liberal as the conservative companies that own it".