The UnNote

UnNote

2005-04-18T17:05:00.000-04:00

Looks like condemnation of ABC News' The Note may be spreading - spurred on by Josh Marshall and myself. To be clear, it's not that I believe The Note intends to conspire against Democrats, at least not consciously, it's that their cynical view of politics as simply being about the 'game' and their desire to detail the winners and losers on all issues means that, when in doubt, they will favor the past winners - the GOP. However, the GOP has clearly not been winning these last few months, yet The Note doggedly sticks to its defense of the bugman and highlights any movement on Social Security which seems to favor Bush. Then there is their constant questioning of Chairman Dean and what he "means" for the party. Add to this their woeful behavior during last year's presidential election (spreading false rumors during the Republican convention that Kerry intended to shake up his campaign team) and one begins to suspect a lot of what The Note says as reflecting a bias towards the winning team.

It probably wouldn't matter so much, except that The Note is the leading daily political brief and the people that read it are the same people that write the stories The Note comments on. This kind of cyclical Washington 'group think' has certainly not favored the Democrats these last few years. More importantly, this kind of 'group think' is a threat to the accuracy of our press and by extension the viability of our democracy.

So much love to give

2005-04-15T17:07:00.000-04:00

Judging by today's edition of The Note, they still don't get it. They spend their opening remarks highlighting a WSJ story that reportedly ( I don't have a WSJ subscription and don't plan to ever get one since some tiny percentage of my money would end up in John Fund's pocket) details the number and frequency of corporate sponsored travel for Congressman and their families and close aides. They seem to want to treat DeLay's transgressions as if it were just one of many but that misses the point.

First of all, there is only 1 Majority Leader. Therefore, DeLay is in a unique position to do the bidding of his corporate paymasters. Secondly, there is almost no evidence that DeLay has ever done anything but his best to fulfill the wishes of his corporate benefactors. Lastly, the amounts of money involved ($100,000 here, $5,000 a month to his wife over there) are truly eye-popping and if this leads to a full airing of all such corporate sponsored travel for members of Congress, even better. However, DeLay put blood in the water long ago by screwing with district lines in Texas and only made it worse with his recent comments about Terri Schiavo and the judiciary. With several close aides in Texas already under indictment, there is little to hold back Democrats looking for a convenient symbol of GOP overreach heading into the midterm elections.

ABC's The Note spent the first months after the November election joking about the Democrats' lack of focus and confusion over who should lead the party. It's unfortunate that they can't at least give props to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for giving the Republicans and President Bush a pretty thorough drubbing so far - something they can hardly contend they expected.

The Note Hearts Delay

2005-04-14T17:07:00.000-04:00

Sickening, why do I read them anymore?

1. There is an iron triangle of liberal interest groups, Democratic congressional staffers, and media jackals (both investigatively minded and liberally oriented) who have never identified with or liked Tom DeLay (and what he stands for) and are enjoying every minute of their conspiring to bring him down.

2. Almost every accusation swirling around DeLay involves actions by him that have exact analogues among other members of Congress of both parties (See, for example, today's front-page Los Angeles Times page-turner about MOCs employing relatives to do campaign work.).

3. If having close ties to self-interested and restaurant-owning lobbyists disqualified someone from a leadership position on Capitol Hill, it would be a body of all Indians and no chiefs. (Note Note: we refuse to indulge in the little boy game of being super excited about the return of the National Pastime to the Nation's Capital, but, yes, that "Indians" thing was for y'all and not meant to offend Native Americans. It was also an Abramoff reference.)

4. And/but without a functioning House ethics committee, there is no natural forum in which Leader DeLay can clear up the legit unanswered questions about some of his conduct. And/but his unwillingness to do it in the feeding frenzy of a packed press conference seems reasonable. May we suggest an interview with The Note, Dan Allen?

The fact is, many of Delay's more serious actions don't have "exact analogues among other members of Congress of both parties." What Delay did was to take money from businesses, foreign governments, Indian tribes and the like, dress it up to look like it was a donation to the generic sounding National Center for Public Policy Research, and then use the money to go on lavish, all expenses paid trips abroad. This is against the law. What he did in Texas, which has lead to several indictments against longtime Delay aides, was essentially the same thing: dressing up money from corporate sponsors and funneling it through the state party in Texas to the RNC and to individual House candidates. Not only that, but he likely used some of this money to stack the Texas State House so he could win approval of his redistricting plan. It's not just that he's a friend of Abramoff's, or employed members of his family. Delay sells his influence in Congress to the highest bidder. Whether the money is used to gerrymander the congressional map in Texas or whether it's used to enrich him personally, Delay finds a way to make them pay.

And for The Note to suggest that this is really all about not having a "natural forum" to clear up some "unanswered questions" when it was DeLay who destroyed the legitimacy of the House ethics committee to begin with...

..JMM has more.

Poped

2005-04-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

It must say something about the current state of affairs in this country that The Note is so consumed by just who will be brought along, with the Bushes, to the Pope's funeral. They spend their column speculating.

Meanwhile, we have Tom DeLay and John Cornyn supporting the murder of federal judges, a GOP majority clearly out of control and over reaching on issues like Social Security, the "Nuclear Option, " and Terri Schiavo and doing themselves real, poll-proven political damage in the process. We Democrats don't mind doing the work of pointing these things out to the press, but let there be no mistake that the GOP crack-up is the real story in American politics today, not who's flying with the Prez to Rome.

...The WaPo sees the light.

The Pope loves Bush

2005-04-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

According to The Note, Bush had a close relationship with the Pope while Clinton's was strained due to the past President's views on abortion and safe sex. Never mind that there was at least as much disagreement between Bush and the Pope over the war in Iraq as there ever was with Clinton over abortion. Never mind that there have been more abortions since Bush became president than there were during Clinton's last four years. And never mind the fact that if you added up all the words about helping the poor that appear in the Bible they would far outnumber the words concerning abortion and gay marriage.

An open letter to The Note

2004-09-06T13:04:00.000-04:00

You conveyed (i.e. Charlie Cook, The Note) in mid-August that this election was Kerry's to lose. At that point the Swift Vets controversy was all the rage on cable and Kerry's campaign was aggressively hitting back, yet the candidate had not responded directly. 40,000 people showed up in Oregon to cap the Kerry-Edwards post-convention tour. With his cross-country trip complete, and mounting evidence of the Bush's campaign's encouragement of the swift vet controversy, Kerry came out several days later with a forceful denunciation of the "smear and fear" tactics used by BC04' in front of an audience of sympathetic firefighters. Media reports confirmed his case, and fully half of the voters believed the ads were the work of BC04' in a survey after Kerry's speech. The cable nets then went to all swift vets, all the time coverage of the campaign. Several days later, Kerry comes to New York's Cooper Union and offers a speech to try and "turn the page," to the real issues of this campaign - peoples' lives. It was painted overwhelmingly by the media as a defensive gesture, not the true sign of a strong candidate it should have been. Kerry used the Bush campaign's refusal to denounce the ads to illustrate their unwillingness to talk about the "issues that matter in this campaign."

You can blab all you want about a candidate losing control of his public image, and the slow direct response from the candidate to the swift vets, but neither of those things bothered you in mid-August when the most vicious ad had already been running for over a week.

Don't play the impartial observer here. The reason Kerry is hurting now is because you made a couple polls that showed a miniscule shift in the President's direction before the convention an excuse to decry the state of the Kerry campaign on the eve of the Republican convention. You decided that the swift vet thing had worked and anyone who read the papers and certainly those watching on cable last week, would quickly have been lead to believe that Kerry was fucked, and was "shaking up " his campaign to boot. Chris Matthews saying, "God help John Kerry" after Tuesday's (!) speeches comes to mind. Of course it didn't matter that none of this was true, you drove the story, hard.

Now you sit back and ask "what happened" and revel in all these real-people-couldn't-care-less political process stories. You want to know what happened? Ask yourselves.

GOP looooooove

2004-09-01T18:49:00.000-04:00

Despite the fact that this convention has been "silent" on the economy, to quote David Gergen, despite the embarrassment that were the Bush daughters last night, despite the blatant ridicule of those living troubled lives in America (i.e. Guiliani's ridiculing of John Edwards' "Two Americas" message and Arnold's "economic girlie-men" slur) and despite the fact that it is only the third day, ABC's The Note sees fit to offer a long litany (31) of what has gone right and a shockingly short (2) and what hasn't worked, "yet" as they put it.

In contrast, The Note waited until the Friday after the Democratic convention to commend the DNC on 11 different items, and criticize them on 9 and offer a list of 6 things "we still don't know."

By all accounts the DNC was rated a success and it addressed a host of issues - domestic and WOT/Iraq related - not just Kerry's service in Vietnam. By contrast the RNC is a little like 'Johnny one note' citing the war on terror as the one and only issue. So what is it about this convention that gets ABC so hard and wet?

Answer: The attacks - the purple heart band-aids, Rove's criticism of Kerry's 1971 testimony, George H. W. Bush calling the Swift Boat ads "compelling" and all the "politically poetic" ways in which the GOP has managed to continue their smear effort of Kerry's service.

Kerry has not directly attacked Bush's service in the National Guard, but when his supporters do The Note makes an issue of the campaign's "inconsistency". When Republicans attack Kerry's Vietnam service, despite Bush's praise of Kerry's heroism in Vietnam, The Note refers to it as "good cop/bad cop" (and they mean it in a good way!).

When counting conservative media, you can happily ad ABC News' The Note to the list.

Bush smears, the Note cheers

2004-08-31T13:49:00.000-04:00

Just how disgusting is it that a major news organization would breathlessly report on the "cleverness," the "political poetry," and the "good cop/bad cop" routine of the GOP's smears on Kerry while juxtaposing that with descriptions of the Kerry campaign in yesterday's edition as "wobbling" and asking if they "can take the pressure of being behind" due to a scandal the media promoted and the Bush campaign is complicit in.

From The Note:

Of course George H.W. Bush lost that election...

ABC news and the politics of personal destruction

2004-08-15T15:13:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Author: Teddy Davis
Title: Kerry on a Roll -- But Risks Remain

As has been documented exclusively on this site, ABC News and their political staff have one objective - to turn John Kerry into a cartoon, as Bill Clinton would say. Attacking his right to a few days rest and his freedom, after weeks on a grueling cross-country campaign swing, "to do something fun" is not beyond their caricature of a rich, aloof, out of touch with the middle class politician.

So windsurfing is "exotic" yet George Bush's sport fishing on a $100,000 speed boat in Kennebunkport last weekend with his father, the 41st President doesn't even warrant a mention?

And we beg to differ with Mr. Davis. Being lower middle class ourselves, we can confirm, once a year, a $250 plane ticket to go "do something fun" is not out of our means. Looking perplexed at a super-market scanner is a far different thing.

The Note feigns outrage!

2004-07-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Author: ABC News' Political Unit
Title: So Ready for This Fight
Cover the Ears and Eyes of Emma Claire and Jack

Here's how The Note describes last night's occasionally rich-humored New York Democratic fundraiser:

There's more and we'll get to that, but let's first look at this paragraph...

1. What, specifically, did Kerry-Edwards do? Not censor the entertainers who helped raise over $7 million? If ABC's standard is so high for campaign entertainers, perhaps they should insist Cheney at least apologize for his F-Bombs on the Senate floor two weeks ago. Cheney said, "I felt better after saying it," and Bush apparently told him, "Those were your words so don't apologize." Those are some Republican values for you.

2. Is Edwards the polar opposite of an "extremely conservative running mate?" Isn't he a Democratic Senator from North Carolina? So wouldn't he normally be considered a "moderate?"

3. Does the ABC News Political Unit really have that tough a time thinking of the last time a Democrat was President and the things that were said about him and the media attention it got, most of it having to do with said President's willy? Oh, I'm sorry, do Paula Jones, Kathleen Wiley and Monica Lewinsky not count?

Going on...

The coverage of last night's Radio City event in print has some elements of this, but not enough for the Bush campaign. And the TV coverage has largely ignored it.Oh, the pooooor Bush campaign. Some celebrities call Bush names and he starts to cry, boo hoo. Who's Mr. Tough Guy now? Your little friends in the media didn't even stick up for you...ohhhh...how sad.

Someone ought to tell Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity with their millions and millions of ditto-head listeners/TV audience members that they simply don't count. Republicans will only believe it if the New York Times says it's so...

There's more:

Although a Kerry spokesman has said that the Democratic ticket doesn't necessarily agree with everything that was said, does anyone believe that the President would be let off the hook that easily if the situation were reversed? Certainly not! Impeachment be damned...

Kerry surges so it's time to attack

2004-06-22T14:59:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Author: ABC News Political Unit
Title: Sooner or Later You Sleep in Your Own Space
Either Way It's Okay, You Wake up with Yourself

As we’ve Noted here numerous times, ABC News, and in particular The Note, are, in the words of our all-but-certain Democratic Nominee, “Doing the work of the RNC.” At the time, The Note ridiculed Kerry’s comment, made on Good Morning America in response to accusations that he has changed his story about whether they were medals or ribbons that he threw over the White House fence during a protest march against the Vietnam War. They called it a “mistake” and hailed the Republican effort to force Kerry into rebutting the charges in the middle of a campaign swing through West Virginia as a tactical victory in the daily campaign back and forth.. However, we at KerryWatch think it’s the truth and if you need further evidence of it, look at today’s Note which leads off with an analysis of the new Washingtonpost/ABC News poll showing Kerry ahead by 4 points in a three-way match up with Bush and Nader and by 8 points in a two-way contest:

WAYS JOHN KERRY CAN STILL BLOW THE ELECTION

Here’s why KerryWatch isn’t amused (in response to the numbers above):

1. If the pictures of Kerry attending church, his frequent quotes from the Bible and his impressive performance at a number of black churches, in particular one on the eve of the Georgia primary – which he won - aren’t evidence of his relative “religiosity” than apparently nothing can convince Brooks or The Note of Kerry’s understanding of the importance this plays in any campaign for President.
2. Bush-Cheney can say anything they want. One of the biggest unreported figures from the WaPo poll is this one:

In short, nobody believes half the crap they try to sell to the American electorate, including on Iraq, the economy and John Kerry.
3. Yea…it’s so funny isn’t it. Some of the most brilliant people in America think Bush needs to go…hahahaha!
4. Bob Shrum wouldn’t talk to The Note if you gave him free cigarettes for life. They only wish he called them as much as lover boy Matt Dowd does.
5. A failure that the media is surely responsible for…The rest of their reasons are just too stupid for a response.

So, in short, on a day when The Note should be explaining to readers how it is that Kerry now leads in 3 out 4 recent national polls, they do nothing but joke around and make one last hopeless attempt to reinsert anti-Kerry talking points into the campaign even though the Bush-Cheney/RNC strategy to destroy Kerry has failed and the labels applied to him don’t seem to be holding him up in the race against Bush.

Letter to The Note

2004-05-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Title: (Un)Civil (Un)Rest
What We All Need is Steady Leadership

The following is a letter Kerry Defense sent to ABC News' Political Unit earlier today in response to their convaluted and biased analysis of the effects of legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts:

Zogby

Kerry's made more mistakes. Oh no!

2004-05-13T14:49:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Title: Presidential Sweet
John Kerry Closes Tough

It would surprise no one who reads The Note to suggest that they don’t seem to be particularly fond of John Kerry. Even after his stunning upset victories in Iowa and New Hampshire they made little reference to any positive attributes Kerry might posses as a candidate and only occasionally referred to his being “presidential” and “electable” – both rather vague terms – when describing his unprecedented success throughout the primaries.

In our “worldview” (to borrow a Note term), fair treatment by the media – and in this case The Note – should compel journalists to talk equally about both the good and the bad aspects of a candidate. However, in The Note, Kerry is often subjected to a litany of criticism. On March 18, just two weeks after Kerry had effectively sewn up the nomination in one of the most successful primary campaigns ever, The Note had this to say about Kerry:

As John Kerry begins his own (semi-)private Idaho vacation, here are the mistakes his campaign has made of late, allowing an aggressive Bush-Cheney operation to win a series of news cycles, during this (ALL TOGETHER NOW!!!) critical period in defining John Kerry for America.They then proceeded to happily catalogue all of Kerry’s presumed “mistakes” including who the campaign put on a conference call with reporters and Kerry’s decision to take a vacation.

Have they ever, EVER, written anything like this about Bush? No. Isn’t Kerry running the most competitive race a challenger has ever run against an incumbent President? Yes. Is Bush being dragged down by a long list of policy failures, including the not so insignificant decision to send troops to war in Iraq? Yes.

So, it comes as no surprise that even now, with polls showing Bush’s approval rating at the lowest point of his presidency, The Note would seek to defend his chances of becoming President and continue their assault on Kerry.

There is that dreaded word again, “mistakes.” Presumably they are referring to some of the same mistakes they listed on March 18 and their view that Kerry has continued to make these kinds of errors. Even if you were to believe them, how do Kerry’s supposed “mistakes” - or our other favorite, “gaffes” - even compare in importance to the recent blunders by the Bush Administration?

In a race as competitive as this, it’s certainly worth noting the relative seriousness of the issues/scandals swirling around Bush at this point in comparison to Kerry’s “mistakes.” (We did Note that Jodi Wilgoren from the New York Times, Glen Johnson from the Boston Globe and Ed Gillespie, the head of the RNC were all neatly lumped together – making them one and the same. This confirms our suspicions all along and one could certainly add ABC News to that list. Remember that medals controversy thingy? Well, guess who leaked the decades old interview of Kerry to the New York Times and ABC News? Yep, you guessed it, the RNC.)

Sounding like a stuttering Karl Rove, The Note adds to it’s list:

10. The war on terror threshold — mostly missing from Kerry campaign polling memos, we notice — remains Bush's trump card.A majority of Americans now view the war in Iraq as not worth fighting in the first place. Bush has said that it is part of the war on terror and the troubles in Iraq are threatening to sink his presidency. In a new CNN/Time Magazine poll released today, Bush leads Kerry on the all-important issue of Terrorism by only 49% - 42%, by far the smallest margin in recent months and on the question of Iraq, more Americans prefer Kerry to Bush 49% - 46%. The person with a “threshold” problem is Bush.

And finally, after hammering Kerry for months for “having no message” now that he has one, The Note takes issue with it:

12. "Strength" without substance … is what, exactly?Strength means Kerry is a strong leader. That he will not back down from solving America’s toughest problems and that he will restore honor and truth to America’s image around the world where it has been badly tarnished by Bush and his arrogant foreign policy. It is this context in which Kerry brings up “strength” in his speeches.

If The Note doesn’t think “strength” is valid, why do they give credence to Bush’s Steady Leadership in Times of Change. George Orwell couldn’t have come up with a more vacuous campaign slogan. Bush has done a part in creating the most horrible kinds of change (i.e. violence) around the world and now he wants to claim to be a “steady” leader?! Bush can’t even make up his mind about what to do with Iraq, leaving Rumsfeld to tell a congressional committee this week, “I look at Iraq and I just hope it turns out well.” Hope is not a policy, and Bush is not a leader of any kind. Not only is the whole slogan meaningless, it’s just a flat out lie.

Now we know The Note hates Kerry

2004-04-29T14:38:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Title: We Keep Pretending That There's Nothing Wrong
But There's a Code of Silence and It Can't Go On

The title is the only thing clever about today's Note. Skipping over the quote from Democratic character-assassin-in-chief Maureen Dowd (which we will examine in an "exclusive" Kwatch opinion piece out later tonight) we find this chunk of pure Note vitriol:

And we would suggest that if John Kerry really wants to run against George Bush on the Patty Loveless notion of a "trouble with truth," he should probably stop saying he hasn't run negative ads against George Bush and get straight what is in the Kerry-Heinz motorpool.

1. If The Note was written by real reporters they would have looked at what Kerry actually said in his address to newspaper editors on April 23 (the speech provoked the RNC to take issue with Kerry's claim on negative ads and in the process distort what he actually said - The Note happily bought the RNC version apparently without ever checking the actualy text of the speech). Here's what Kerry said:

I never ran one negative advertisement against my opponents in the primaries."Opponents in the primaries" is quite different from "President Bush."

2. Kerry said yesterday, "All my cars are American. The ones I've personally bought are American." That seems pretty clear to us. Some tend to forget that Kerry and Teresa married only 10 years ago and that Teresa has her own life - cars, homes, planes, that were bought with her money before marrying Kerry.

After four years of "W speak" simple English is suddenly hard for some reporters to understand.

Do they watch his ads?

2004-04-23T14:24:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABC News
Author: ABC News' Political Unit
Title: Sovereign Nation

The Note is at it again. They say they don't know what Kerry's priorities are:

It will be interesting to see if the Senator calibrates his women's rights remarks with anything approaching centrist rhetoric, and to hear his "priorities" agenda at the ASNE (since we are still trying to figure out what those are . . .)Here is the script from a recent Kerry ad entitled, "Committment":

national priorities

First

Second

third

My priorities are jobs and healthcare. My commitment is to defend this country

Bold face is added.

The Note sides with our rightwing foes

2004-04-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

News Source: ABCNews.com
Authors: ABC News political unit
Title: It Was a Dark and Stormy Day
Rolling Thunder

Posted below is an email I sent to The Note . Also included is their response to my email:

Lisa- (Lisa is Lisa.M.Todorovich@abc.com)

I’m sorry to badger you again, but you are the only Noter to ever write me back. I plan to stop bugging you after this and will post all my grievances on http://kerrywatch.org

But I must take issue with the headline items on today edition of The Note: (my responses are in bold)

Response:Team Kerry, as you more affectionately called it in the past, responded by releasing all the records on the campaign website within two days. Bush-Cheney didn’t for a week and even then it failed to answer the basic question about where he was a year while he was supposed to be serving in the Alabama National Guard.

2. The WhiteHouseBC04RNC machine is awesome at seizing on an issue in the news, getting their talking points and marching orders disseminated and putting Kerry on the defensive and looking Clinton-Goreish. They are organized, relentless, and savvy.Response: This is a low blow. Clinton ran a superb rapid reaction team, and it wasn’t his fault the Republicans chose to simply lie through their teeth and hurl one tabloid attack after another his way. Why praise BC04RnC for pushing a phony line of attack since there is no there, there?

3. The Kerry campaign’s rolling release of the military records (We loved the Aaron Brown-Kelly Wallace play-by-play on the process last night!!) suggests that they are doing the kind of purge-it-all-out move that such contretemps demand. But what of the Washington Post report that Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s tax returns could be next?Response: So you are looking forward to a Heinz Kerry tax flap? Perhaps The Note can run a column in the NY Post on what they think the next “scandal” will be.

4. It’s clear that it’s NOT clear if the military records will yield a darn thing. So far, the only clear area of possible controversy (beyond the non-release) involves the terms of the first Kerry Purple Heart, and we are old enough to know that it didn’t take much to get one, and there is at least some documentation of an injury.Response: “It didn’t take much to get one”???!!!!!!! Are you implying purple hearts aren’t that hard to get? Are you insane. I guess you all went to ‘Nam and thought getting wounded in Vietnam was no big deal? I doubt many on your staff were even born yet. Give me a break.

“Some documentation”…in fact there is a medical report detailing the injury. Is that not enough?

It’s clear the records don’t yield a thing except to serve as further reminders of Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam.

More Note: Republicans will continue to try to raise questions, and here are ours at this writing: -Included are my responses

a. Is the campaign withholding any records? -What, like more proof beyond certificates from the Navy that the medals are for real?

b. Has the military got any records that the Kerry campaign doesn't have?-Would that be a fault of Kerry’s?

c. What, if any, documents are missing?-Why are you the only ones that care?

Look, the problem is it was never clear what was being contested? Was anyone seriously claiming Kerry’s medals weren’t for real beyond your average right-wing smear mongers? The ONLY reason Kerry had to release these is that he said he would on MTP. If it was for more than that you ought to explain to readers, what exactly was contested and not simply leave an impression that Kerry was seeking to hide something by not having put these records out there months ago. Your actions are a disgrace to fair journalism. The Note happily joins Rush Limbaugh’s John F. Kerry Stack of Stuff.

Congratulations.

-A no longer loyal reader.

The Note's response: