No "Mo" From Holy Joe

Before I get to the main subjects of this post (Senator Honor and Virtue and the cretin pictured and referenced in the title), I’d like to take a minute and dissect this blog post from Matt Bai of The New York Times in which he starts out discussing “sock puppetry” (i.e., someone online masquerading as an impartial observer though they actually support a candidate – I had to relearn that myself some time back), but then takes some random reader questions…

Diane Montana says: I just spent a week in Iowa, and unlike Mr. Bai, I did get a sense of what Iowans are thinking. How? I asked them. Health care and a big distrust of Washington is on everybody’s lips. Iowans are fairly mild mannered, but there is much frustration and anger there. And they are not big on gossip. They would prefer to talk about policy.

Why didn’t I think of that? Actually, Diane, we reporters talk to lots and lots of voters, but only the less industrious of us would try to pass that off as a good sampling of public opinion. It’s often illuminating, but it’s not a very comprehensive indicator of how specific candidate are faring with the voters, which is the point I was making. You are certainly right about the issues and the general mood here.

Finally, Governor Culver’s press secretary, Brad Anderson, called to tell me that Mrs. Culver did indeed make her own endorsement, independent of the governor, and that the governor might well have tried to stop her. So there. No word yet on whom the Culver children will be endorsing.

I’ll dismiss Bai’s “only the less industrious of us” remark even though I think that’s a pretty crappy attitude towards other reporters perhaps talking to more voters than he is and note that “Diane Montana” may be a “sock puppet” for John Edwards. However, is it too much trouble for Bai to note here that Mrs. Culver actually endorsed John Edwards (here)??!!

Oh, sorry – I should have realized that it was more important for Bai to make a smart remark about the “endorsement” of Mrs. Culver’s kids than it was to give Edwards a fair shake.

And I also want to note this from Bai’s post…

Upstate NY Progressive writes: Can you please attempt to decipher which, if any, of the second-tier Democratic candidates may possibly have a better chance in the caucuses than everyone is giving them? Do any of them have momentum? Can any of them pull off a dark horse upset and come in the top three on caucus night??

This is a good question. My gut here is that there isn’t much room for any true dark horses this time in Iowa, but I am curious to see if John McCain can surprise a lot of people in New Hampshire. Also, an interesting question is whether any of the top-tier candidates will finish much worse than expected in Iowa, as Howard Dean did in 2004.

God, it’s way too damn funny (in an unintentional way) for Bai to completely disregard the rest of the Democratic field and lapse right into the narrative of “John McCain is poised for a comeback in New Hampshire” story line (of course, the Times barely acknowledged the heroic effort of Chris Dodd to push back the FISA vote, so why should they even consider the possibility that that would translate into a higher placement in the Iowa caucuses?).

It’s a shame that Bai didn’t bother to read his fellow Times columnist Peter Applebome today (here), who noted the following about the typically traitorous endorsement by Joe Lieberman of McCain for the Repug presidential nomination…

What this means for Mr. McCain is not clear. The best-case scenario is that it helps draw in independents in New Hampshire. But when Mr. Lieberman was on the ticket in 2000, it was the only New England state to go for George W. Bush. And when Mr. Lieberman ran for president in 2004, he got all of 9 percent of the Democratic primary vote.

Now I know that state trends Republican anyway, but somehow I don’t think The Last Honest Man is going to provide the “bounce” McCain is looking for, which would "take the air" out of Bai and his sunny prediction.

And by the way, concerning another high-profile individual who endorsed McCain recently (here), I think “Top-Step Shill” should take that bloody sock and shove it in his mouth if that’s the only thing that will keep him quiet (here - not a fan of Clemens either, but he’s certainly entitled to his awards despite the controversy, I believe).

Update: By the way, that “straight-talking Maverick” said at a campaign stop in Columbia, S.C. here that…

…he wanted to create an Army Advisory Corps of 20,000 soldiers to act as military advisers and a new Office of Strategic Services to fight terrorists. He said he wanted them to pursue "a crash program in civilian and military schools" to prepare more experienced speakers in strategically important languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi and others, and to "create a new specialty in strategic interrogation — a new, a new group of strategic interrogators so that we never have to feel motivated to torture anyone ever again."

Of course, after making the torture remark, McCain quickly backpedaled and said he didn’t think “U.S. forces” were doing that (playing the legalese game of trying to absolve our military while leaving contractors in that gray area as always, of course).

Still, though, McCain is right to emphasize more language skills that our “forces” should bring to bear in the legitimate fight with terror (which is more about tactics, communications, the common-sense rule of law and working with other nations than anything else).

And that’s one of the reasons why this story is so disturbing.