Winners & Sinners

Winner: Barack Hussein Obama, for triumphing where every other president of the United States has failed. It won’t include a public option, and even the Health Insurance Rate Authority, which could have cancelled premium increases, has been kicked out of the reconciliation fixes by the Senate parliamentarian.  And yet, if the House manages to pass the health care reform bill tomorrow, after countless near-death experiences, this will be a gigantic achievement for Obama and his much-maligned White House political machine.  In years to come, the bill will require endless additions and revisions–but that only makes it exactly the same as the original laws enacting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  And despite the endless palaver of Republican officeholders, this is a huge political plus for Democrats fighting for re-election in the fall.  If nothing had been passed, the Democrats never would have been able to shake their reputation for legislative impotence.
Somewhere, Teddy Kennedy is smiling.

Update: Sinner Dan Balz has the worst kind of Washington on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hand analysis in Sunday’s Washington Post, in which he boldly argues that the Democrats will pay a big price for enacting an historic health care reform bill–or they won’t. Spoiler alert! Newt Gingrich believes the former.

History is made:  At 10:45 PM EDT on Sunday, March 21, 2010, the deed was finally done, when the 216th vote was recorded in favor of HR 3590, the Health Care Reform Bill  approved by the Senate last December.  The final vote in the House was 219 to 212.  It came two and a half hours after 60 Minutes aired Kati Couric’s highly favorable profile of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.  Well, tonight he deserved it.

Sinner: Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt.  First he hired ex-Bush speechwriter and fulltime torture apologist Marc Thiessen, whose “giggly, repressed hysteria” is “uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn,” as Frank Rich observed.  Then Hiatt wrote an exceptionally mindless column  about Obama’s “happiness deficit,” which was brilliantly dissected  by

Winner Greg Marx, paragraph by paragraph. Like this:

Hiatt: I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when Obama confidant David Axelrod, noting that the president always makes time for his daughters’ recitals and soccer games, told the New York Times, “I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”
Really? Is the presidency something to sustain yourself through?

Marx: Aspiring column writers: note the skillful use of a weeks-old boilerplate quote from an aide as the threadbare cloth from which a new column is spun. Also, the affectation of populist resentment. That’s how the pros do it!

Winner: The tireless Gabe Sherman, for his sparkling 7,300 word exegesis of the war between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  Sherman got just about everyone to talk on the record, including the get-of-the-year: Rupert Murdoch’s 101 year-old mother, whom Sherman reached on the phone at her home in Australia.  Dame Elisabeth had these sobering words for her grandchildren: “I’m sure [Rupert] will never retire.  I don’t intend to retire either, and I’m 101.”  And then there was this startling exchange between Sherman and ex-Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld:  “Hats off to Murdoch; he’s serious about print journalism. He’s the last guy standing who believes in it,” says Lelyveld. “Arthur [Sulzberger] is the guy who said a few years ago he didn’t know if the Times will be standing as a print newspaper.” When I asked Lelyveld if he thought his former boss Sulzberger believed in the value of the Times’ print edition, he grew quiet. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to answer that question.”  Which in turn inspired

Winner Howell Raines (Lelyveld’s successor) to write this about Lelyveld’s comment: “This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.”  The rest of Raines’ attack in The Washington Post on the MSM’s kid-gloves treatment of Murdoch and Roger Ailes is also well worth reading. 

And speaking of Fox News, why is it that only

Winner Jon Stewart ever gives the words of Glenn Beck the attention they deserve, including these immortal declarations: “The roots of progressivism lead to fascism.  One had the hammer and sickle, the other was the swastika but on each banner, here in America, read the words, ‘Social Justice.’”  On Thursday, Stewart spent the first thirteen minutes and five seconds of his show  channeling Beck–brilliantly.

Winner: Rachel Maddow, for her model visit with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, during which the smartest interviewer on cable television showed how you can be tough, thorough and sophisticated, without ever losing your temper. 

In other words, she displayed all of the qualities that

Sinner: the always smirking David Gregory, never displays on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Winner: Marc Lacey for a terrifying account on the front page of The New York Times of the horrific effect of the Mexican drug wars on the reporters trying to cover them:  Traffickers have gone after the media with a vengeance in these strategic border towns where drugs are smuggled across by the ton. They have shot up newsrooms, kidnapped and killed staff members and called up the media regularly with threats that were not the least bit veiled. Back off, the thugs said. Do not dare print our names. We will kill you the next time you publish a photograph like that.  “They mean what they say,” said one of the many terrified journalists who used to cover the police beat in Reynosa. “I’m censoring myself. There’s no other way to put it. But so is everybody else.”

Winner: Nick Turse, for a superb expose of America’s appalling edifice complex in Iraq (a $750 million embassy and three hundred military bases) and Afghanistan (a $175 million plus expansion of the embassy in Kabul plus 400 U.S. bases, and another 300 for Afghan soldiers and policemen.)  Not to mention nearly a billion dollars more for a new embassy in Pakistan.

Winner: Ron Unz, for an in-depth debunking of the myth of an immigrant crime wave in America–published, remarkably, in The American Conservative.

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