Debunking the Politico BULLSHIT conspiracy "It's ALL a Secret White House Plot Against Rush" meme

From: Boys' night out: "The Politico guys," Rove's top disciple and how our press corps works

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...Martin wrote a http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/1008/McCain_will_be_accused_of_racism_regardless.html">widely-cited post at Politico vigorously -- even angrily -- defending John McCain from accusations that the McCain/Palin campaign has been exploiting racist resentment. Sounding like Rush Limbaugh (or Karl Rove), Martin railed against what he called the "outrage industry, ever on the lookout for any sign of racism and quick to pounce even when it's not there," and repeatedly lamented on McCain's behalf that he's in "in a no-win position." (Martin was among those who attended the cozy weekend at the McCain compound in Sedona in March and caused Megan McCain so memorably to gush: "It was really fun to kind of see big journalist figures like Holly Bailey swinging on the tire swing, and Jon Martin helping my dad grill ribs . . . The guys from the Politico brought (my mom, Cindy) flowers which I still think is the most adorable thing ever, so thank you, I thought it was like so cute that they decided to bring my mom flowers . . . ")

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More: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/12/griffin

From: The Dittohead Party: Why the GOP is Screwing Itself

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...contrary to what Drudge and Politico are reporting today, this isn't some sort of wicked conspiracy cooked up by Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs from within the same underground war room where they keep the president's madrassa diploma and his secret Kenyan birth certificate.

This Limbaugh situation is entirely the fault of the Republican Party. The White House is merely exploiting it -- and rightly so.

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Governor Jindal: "I think Rush is a great leader for conservatives."

Chairman Michael Steele: "I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh."

Congressman Mike Pence: "I think Rush Limbaugh -- who I admire, and like millions of Americans, I cherish his voice in the public debate."

And so the Republicans expect to be taken seriously now?

No wonder the White House is gleefully winking and nudging everyone in the direction of this Republican clown car of awfulness -- if not for the political advantage, for the sheer spectacle of watching the once mighty Republican Party effectively screwing itself. The Democrats, on one hand, appear to be busily going about the business of cleaning up the mess left behind by three decades of Reaganomics while, on the other the hand, the Republicans are duct-taping themselves to the ample bosom of the most self-satirical political sideshow geek in American media history, while also expecting this will help their electoral chances.


Full article (well worth reading the whole thing): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-dittohead-party-how-t_b_171979.html

New Media Meme: Obama Team Solely To Blame For Rush Story

New media meme alert: A secret plot hatched solely by the White House is entirely to blame for the Rush Limbaugh story getting so much media attention and turning into a media circus.

This shiny new meme is popping up on the same day (today) that top Republicans launched a new offensive, accusing the White House of deliberately focusing attention on Limbaugh to divert attention from solving the country’s problems.

This version of events has its genesis in this Politico piece reporting on the inner workings of the Democratic strategy to hang Rush around the necks of Republicans. Drudge linked the piece with the blaring headline: “Enemies List: White House Plots Limbaugh Coverage.” Time’s Michael Scherer argued that it shows that this “entire controversy has been cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama’s advisers.” Reporters pushed the idea at today’s White House press briefing.

But come on: None of this is really true. Or at least, it’s a grotesque exaggeration.

First of all, the Politico piece just doesn’t say this. If anything, the reporting in there proves the opposite. The piece says that the “strategy took shape” after Dem strategists James Carville and Stan Greenberg polled on Rush and found him to be deeply unpopular. But as Steve Benen notes, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017144.php">Carville and Greenberg aren’t Obama advisers, let alone White House advisers.

That’s not all. The piece explicitly says that groups outside the White House — the DCCC, the Center for American Progress, and the labor-backed Americans United for Change — were the first to push the strategy.

The main data points in the piece on White House involvement? That Carville and Begala, and other outside groups, began discussing the strategy with White House advisers — after the two were already pounding the Rush theme on television. Also, that White House advisers started publicly pushing the Rush angle — after the story was going full throttle, after Rush had reiterated his desire for Obama to fail at CPAC, and after reporters asked the White House for reaction to Rush.

That suggest that Rush and the press also played something of a role in ensuring that this story was a major media circus.

It’s true, as Sam Stein reports, that White House press sec Robert Gibbs acknowledged some sort of role in helping to create this circus. And of course White House advisers discussed ways of pushing this story. But they obviously did so after many other parties — operating largely independently — ensured that it was in full swing.

Anyone paying attention to this story knows it developed “organically,” as Paul Begala put it to me last week. There’s just no “there” here.

From: http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/political-media/new-media-meme-obama-team-solely-to-blame-for-rush-story/

GOP Launching Smear Tactics Perfected During Clinton Years on Obama

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted March 3, 2009.

Republicans seem incapable of coming up with any other strategy than to seek Obama's destruction, much as they torpedoed Clinton.

The official history of what happened during Bill Clinton's difficult first two years -- which ended in a sweeping Republican congressional victory in 1994 -- focuses on the GOP's united resistance to his economic plan and Hillary Clinton's failed health care reform. But there was a darker side to the political damage inflicted on the early Clinton administration.

Republicans and their right-wing allies disseminated what -- in a covert operation -- would be called "black propaganda." Some exaggerated minor scandals, like the Travel Office firings and Clinton's Whitewater real-estate deal, while other key figures on the Right, such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, spread ugly conspiracy rumors linking Clinton to "mysterious deaths" and cocaine smuggling.

Sometimes, these multiplying "Clinton scandals" built on themselves with the help of their constant repetition in both the right-wing and mainstream news media. For instance, overheated accusations about some personnel changes at the White House Travel Office pushed deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster into a deep depression.

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But the machine wore down in its defense of Bush's multitude of disasters and ultimately could not generate enough suspicions about Obama to elect John McCain. Still, it remains a potent force in the country and particularly among the Republican "base."

It is also a machine that can run only on the high-octane fuel of anger and hate. If it tried to down-shift to a more responsible approach to politics, it would stall out, losing its core audience of angry white men who feel deeply aggrieved by their loss of status.

In turn, Republican leaders can't disown the right-wing media infrastructure that has advanced their interests for so long. In the first month of Obama's presidency, the congressional Republicans fell in line behind Rush Limbaugh's openly declared desire for Obama to fail.

Now, the Republicans may see little choice but to bet on the ability of their Right-Wing Machine to continue spreading doubts and hysteria about Obama.

More books and DVDs can be expected soon, recycling the 2008 campaign's rumor-mongering on Obama -- that he wasn't born in the United States, that he's a secret Muslim, that he's in league with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, etc.

Rumbling Insurrection

Much like the Clinton-era militia movement's fear of "black helicopters," there already are rumblings about the need for an armed uprising to thwart Obama's alleged "communist" agenda.

Ironically, right-wingers who defended George W. Bush when he mounted a radical assault on the Constitution -- seeking to establish an imperial presidency while eliminating habeas corpus and other key freedoms -- are suddenly seeing threats to the Constitution from Obama.

Fox News, in particular, has been floating the idea of armed rebellion. On Feb. 20 -- the one-month anniversary of Obama's inauguration -- Glenn Beck hosted a special program called "War Room" that "war-gamed" various scenarios including the overthrow of an oppressive U.S. government when "bubba" militias rise up and gain the support of the American military.

The segment featured former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, retired U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong, and Gerald Celente, a prognosticator who began pitching the idea of an armed rebellion on Fox News shortly after Obama's election last November.

"This is going to be violent," said Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute. "People can't afford it anymore. The cities are going to look like Dodge City. They're going to be uncontrollable. You're going to have gangs in control. Motorcycle marauders. You're not going to have enough police or federales -- just like Mexico -- to control the situation."

Beck envisioned the uprising -- theoretically set in 2014 -- starting "because people have been so disenfranchised" leading to a "bubba effect" touched off by federal agents from the ATF or FBI arresting some rancher in Texas or Arizona who has taken the law into his own hands in defending his property.

"That's totally possible," ex-Sgt. Strong said. "You've got people who are going to do the right thing to truly protect the interests of the United States, to include their own. … Your second and third orders of effect are going to be your bubbas hunkering down and being anti-government."

Beck, who was a longtime fixture on CNN's Headline News before moving to Fox, then expanded on the justification for the bubba uprising against a federal government that was "coming in and disenfranchising people over and over and over again -- and having the people say please listen to us."

According to Beck, these oppressed Americans "know the Constitution. They know the writings of the Founders and they feel that the government -- or they will in this scenario and I think we're on this road -- the government has betrayed the Constitution. So they will see themselves as people who are standing up for the Constitution."

Beck then turned to ex-CIA officer Scheuer and asked, "So how do you defuse this, Michael, or how long even do we have before this becomes a crazy real scenario?"

"I don't think you'd want to defuse it, Glenn," Scheuer responded. "The Second Amendment is … at base not about hunting or about a militia, but about resisting tyranny. The Founders were very concerned about allowing individual citizens weaponry to defend themselves as a last resort against a tyrannical government."

As the discussion edged toward advocacy of violent revolution, Beck sought to reel it back in a bit.

"Don't get me wrong," the host said. "I am against the government. And I think they've just been horrible. I do think they are betraying the principles of our Founders every day they're in office. But I have to tell you this scenario scares the living daylights out of me because it is shaking nitroglycerine."

Beck then got back to the point: "Do the soldiers come in and do they round up people or do they fight with the people for the Constitution? What does the Army, what does the military do?"

Scheuer answered: "I don't think the military is ever going to shoot on the American people, sir. I think the military -- of all people -- read the Constitution every year, right through."

Beck then suggested that Obama's stimulus package might lead to this back-door federal tyranny.

"We just had in our stimulus package a way for if your governor says no to the money, the legislature can go around the governor and go right to the Feds," Beck said. "It's this kind of thing that would make the federal government say, ‘You know what? We can call up the National Guard. We don't need your governor to do it.'"

Such insurrectionist musings on Fox News are not likely to be taken seriously by most people. Indeed, many Americans may find it amusing that Fox has developed a heartfelt concern about disenfranchising voters after its enthusiastic embrace of Bush's undemocratic "election" in 2000 or that Fox now feels a sudden reverence for the Constitution after eight years of defending Bush as he trampled it.

But this sort of Fox chatter runs the risk of feeding the well-nursed grievances of angry white "bubbas" and possibly inspiring a new Timothy McVeigh.

More significantly, today's Republican leaders -- finding themselves with little new to offer -- appear to have turned to the well-worn pages of this earlier GOP playbook to choose the same game plan that set the nation on a dangerous and destructive course 16 years ago, a course that only now, finally, may be playing out.

Full article: http://www.alternet.org/democracy/129726/gop_launching_smear_tactics_perfected_during_clinton_years_on_obama/?page=entire#comments

Most voters don't see Limbaugh as GOP chief
Democrats use radio host to rally base
Joseph Curl THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Friday, March 6, 2009

With President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove gone, the Democrats have lost easily identifiable right-wing leaders to vilify.

But Democrats think they've found a replacement - Rush Limbaugh - even if most Americans aren't buying it.

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At the same time, Operation Limbaugh, which was reportedly hatched by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other Democratic operatives, is risky, especially since the popular conservative radio host isn't confined by the typically restrained language of elected lawmakers.

"Rush Limbaugh has fired up the base of the Republican Party there is no question, and those are the activists that will be needed to get them back on their feet," Mrs. Marsh said.

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