culture industry - Ailes edition

1. NYT article on Roger Ailes and his pernicious influence. ("Fox chief at the pinnacle of news and politics") Good Perlstein quote that provides good hook to use in culture war II week.

2. Also, Digby writes about the Post ombudsman finally addressing the paper's outsourcing of content to the right-wing Peterson group Fiscal Times. Opening section:

The Washington Post ombudsman finally responded to the complaints about the paper's inappropriate relationship with Pete Peterson and his new "news" operation the Fiscal Times. He says there's nothing wrong with it because Peterson has hired good reporters and the stories will be edited by the paper's staff.

Dean Baker wonders if he would say the same thing if the paper contacted with the NRAs "Firearms Gazette" or the tobacco industry's "Smoking Today." After all, he seems to think that theFiscal (End) Times can be trusted, with safeguards, to write unbiased copy. But here's the rub:

Can anyone imagine the Peterson Foundation putting a story showing how much the failure of the Fed to combat the housing bubble added to country's debt? How about a piece that showed that the U.S. deficit problem is driven entirely by our broken health care system?

No, these pieces, or many others like them, are not going to run in the Fiscal Times, because that is not what Peter Peterson wants to buy with his millions. And, the very good reporters who have signed up to work for the Fiscal Times know very well what the boss wants, even if he does not intervene directly in their reporting.

Culture industry meets culture war! Good for the last weeks.

3. Glen Greenwald on the new court gossip book that's dominated news the last few days. First two grafs suffice:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book,Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is pouring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent littleVersailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting howintensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

As he notes in closing: The people who brought you two years of Bill Clinton's penis haven't gone anywhere. They've only gotten stronger.

"A speech stuck on repeat"

Dana Milbank comments in the Post on Mitch McConnell's epic run of anti-health care speeches:

These speeches, about 44,000 words in all, test the outer limits of human stamina. Ninety-four times he warned of the evils of a "government-run" system, according to a Washington Post analysis. Forty-seven times he warned of a "government takeover" of the same. Fourteen times he railed against the Democrats' nefarious "experiment." Thirty-seven times he spoke the phrases "higher taxes" or "raise taxes," and at least 19 times he used the words "slash Medicare" or "Medicare cuts."

Perhaps more accurate than saying that McConnell gave 50 health-care speeches would be saying that McConnell gave the same health-care speech 50 times, with minor changes. And this in itself is a major achievement: Only a disciplined and well-conditioned public orator could repeat himself so often without injury.

Of course, it's part of the longstanding GOPAC strategy of framing and message discipline. Includes the following tag cloud:

Good to assign for the framing week.

link dump

"Micro-scripts" -- a few good ideas in the article but generally pretty superficial. ("Guess who's losing the great phrase face-off" in Boston.com, by Bill Schley. By an author of a new book by the same title.

Some good links from Dave Neiwert on how Liberal Fascism transmitted through the discourse. Sad sad sad. ("Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?")

Finally, an article in Columbia Journalism Review that contemplates why some protests get coverage and some don't. (Teabaggers, astroturfed town hall riots = yes. Protests at a health care CEO's house? No -- "too staged" according to the journalists.)

McCain's many narratives

NYT reports on the McCain camp's inability to come up with a sustained narrative for their candidate. ("The Making (And Remaking) of McCain" by Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain.)

I'm kind of pissed that 'narrative' has become the buzzword this campaign, yet nobody ever talks with historians. Waah. Let's have some Hayden White!!

P&G worships the devil!!

From Slacktivist, a background to the viral rumor (that I am just hearing of) that a P&G exec went on TV and declared that the company sends a portion of its profits to the Church of Satan. ("False witness") Turns out it was a calculated plot by another soap company to target the evangelical community.

The post analyzes of why people pass on rumors that are obviously false. Malice, or stupidity? After much thought and resistance to the idea, Slacktivist decides on the former:

The dossier/Snopes approach doesn't work because it attempts to apply facts and reason to people who are not interested in either facts or reason. That's not a nice thing to say, or even to think, about anyone else, which is why I was reluctant and slow to reach that conclusion. But that conclusion was inevitable.

In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:

1. I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.

2. I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith -- that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.

3. I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.

4. Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.

All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling -- so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.

But it is the case.

I kept expecting a comparison to recent political events, but s/he is more restrained than I.

antiwar voices

In the wake of the NYT military analysts story, we're paying more attention to who was allowed on tv in 2002-3. Kevin Drum provides an alaysis done by some cats at Syracuse ("Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq"):

The data flatly contradict the claim that dissenting views were "shut out" of news coverage....When the two networks are aggregated together, the distribution of source quotes is 34% supportive, 35% neutral, and 30% opposed.

What a relief! But wait. It turns out that virtually all of the supportive quotes came from the Bush administration (no surprise) while nearly all of the opposed quotes came from....

Foreigners. Yep. Despite the fact that plenty of Democratic politicians and U.S. experts opposed the war, the news networks almost completely shut off domestic sources of criticism...

There's a chart of who's in what category. So it's mostly Iraqis, UN nerds, etc. who presented the case against the war. Helpful? Hardly.

Needless to say, relying on Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan to be the almost exclusive face of the anti-war movement is even worse than ignoring it. As the authors say blandly, "It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration's motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans' perceptions of Saddam Hussein's arguments about why war was a bad idea."

And the American public says... La la la, I'm not listening.

Pentagon-paid propaganda

More secret plans revealed (Wired)... A study written for US Special Operations Command suggested:

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning…. Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

Now, there's no evidence they ever actually followed through on this. And there are plenty of crazy wingers ready to attack anyone they're pointed at without being paid. But on the other hand, given the hiring of journalists and columnists by the administration, and the Pentagon's own interests in the media war, it wouldn't be surprising if they had.

See also: C&L,

smashing GOP myths

Speaking of GG, he's plugging his new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. And if it's written at the level of his preview of it, I'm sold:

The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates -- the more consequential the issue, the less establishment media attention it receives, the less real public debate there is over it. Instead, our elections are determined by the barren, petty personality-based distractions and mindless chatter that define the lowly Drudgian Freak Show, where our political life now almost exclusively resides.

The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.

Comes out April 15.

torture TV

Via AS, Scott Horton at Harpers notes that when he says "torture" in an interview segment, it doesn't air in the US:

I discovered that when I gave interviews to major media on this subject, any time I used the word “torture” with reference to these techniques, the interview passage would not be used. At one point I was informed by a cable news network that “we put this on international, because we can’t use that word on the domestic feed.” “That word” was torture.

I was coached or told that the words “coercive interrogation technique” were fine, but “torture” was a red light. Why? The Administration objected vehemently to the use of this word. After all, President Bush has gone before the cameras and stated more than three dozen times “We do not torture.” By using the T-word, I was told, I was challenging the honesty of the president. You just couldn’t do that. [...]

He then talks about how Surnow created "24" to enable torture, and how Cheney ruthlessly forced the acceptance of "dark side" techniques on the country:

We should start with a frank question: has “24” been created with an overtly political agenda, namely, to create a more receptive public audience for the Bush Administration’s torture policies? I think the answer to that question is now very clear. The answer is “yes.” In “Whatever It Takes,” Jane Mayer has waded through the sheaf of contacts between the show’s producer, Joel Surnow, and Vice President Cheney and figures right around him. There is little ambiguity about this point, namely, if the torture system introduced after 9/11 can be traced back to a single person, it is Vice President Cheney.

Scary as usual. Even scarier is how few people care.

The Horton story itself is fantastic: a full history of the media's relationship with torture, a graph of depictions of torture on network tv (peaks in 2003), echoes of the Algerian war, etc. Great.

Don't usually quote in entirety, but this is too precious. From kos:

Politico:

Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.

The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.

Step one: stop being racist. Appearing less racist then becomes less of a challenge.

Report itself is of possible utility in discussions of republican party's long-term racism.

Beauchamp lesson plan

A comparative occupations course would do well to consider the unique problems of occupation in a media age. Media policy and control have always been useful in war, but today in Iraq they present doubled difficulty. Each soldier can also be a reporter -- sometimes without knowing it, simply through their cameraphones. The Scott Thomas Beauchamp affair of 2007 is a natural case study for this problem. This is my effort at a comprehensive link collection to guide a student through the affair using the original documents.

The initial TNR piece ("Shock Troops") was a war story out of occupied Iraq in which the pseudonymous narrator and other soldiers make mean-spirited comedy out of the tragedy surrounding them. A roundup post at Obsidian Wings chronicles the outrage that ensued. (TNR links are tricky; I tried to get stable ones. If they fail over time, check the issues for July-August, October, December 2007.) The roundup is two weeks after publication, and Thomas has just revealed himself as a soldier... The right had at first denied his very existence, as they had with Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein.

In the middle phase, as Private Thomas' story is challenged in the media and by the Army, some left-academic blogs revealed a connection between this single incident and the larger context of the right's "One Endless Rathergate". (Jon Swift provided a comprehensive roundup of winger crybabiness).

To get a flavor of the venom slung during the exchanges, you have to go into the original red-side posts. Glen later chronicled the National Review and respectable-right media's reactions (in the context of wondering why they were later excusing plagiarism in their own ranks.) Example:

They repeatedly posted one self-righteous attack on TNR after the next over what they insisted was TNR's reckless, even deliberate, deceit. They re-printed a vicious anti-TNR rant by Charles Krauthammer, first published in The Washington Post, in which Krauthammer accused TNR of publishing the Beauchamp stories only because "it fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar Left."

For the intelligent left, some of the comments on threads like these are just gold. It's an amazing new world when there is so much expertise on so many subjects available for exchange. One former military guy expresses what's been my take all along (without the real-world cred to back it up, but hey, I read a lot):

Having spent 22 years in the Army, I can say with some emphasis that there is almost nothing that most privates, and NOTHING that some privates, won't do, including incredibly stupid, hitting-self-in-head-with-hammer type of things. So the idea that this stuff didn't happen because "they wouldn't do it"? don't make me laugh.

And remember, you're talking about a bunch of 19-year-old guys with guns in a pretty much broken down Third World country. If your squad leader/PSG/1SG are weak, bored, stupid or distracted? Let the fun begin!

There's an epilogue to the affair in which the Army puts STB on lockdown, conducts a bunch of interviews and concludes that they cannot verify the stories -- on which they are pronounced an illegitimate leftist plot... by the supposedly left-leaning TNR.

TNR did their investigation, the story held up. Their statement in the August 2 issue had a revealing last bit:

Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.

They followed this up with a "Scott Beauchamp Update" in October as this thing was still going on. It underscores the broader significance of the episode for the manipulation of the media by an unchecked executive fighting a counterinsurgency in a media age.

The New Republic is deeply frustrated by the Army’s behavior. TNR has endeavored with good faith to discover whether Beauchamp’s article contained inaccuracies and has repeatedly requested that the Army provide us with documentary evidence that it was fabricated or embellished. Instead of doing this, the Army leaked selective parts of the record—including a conversation that Beauchamp had with his lawyer—continuing a months-long pattern by which the Army has leaked information and misinformation to conservative bloggers while failing to help us with simple requests for documents.

Glen Greenwald wrote on the Army's selective leaking of documents to right-wing bloggers (while they at the same time withheld them from TNR's FOIA request), a move right out of the Bush administration playbook. Glen fears that the Army under Petraeus is getting as politicized as everything else under Bush's influence.

A few days later Glen received "a bizzare, unsolicited email" from Petraeus' spokesman. (He's posted the full text here.) But Glen noted that this was no refutation:

Col. Boylan does not deny the central point of my post, because he cannot: namely, throughout the Beauchamp matter, the U.S. Army has copied almost exactly the standard model used by the Republican Party's political arm in trying to manage news for domestic consumption: namely, they deny access to the relevant information only they possess while selectively leaking it to the most extremist and partisan elements of the right-wing noise machine: in this case, the Drudge Report, Weekly Standard, and right-wing blogs.

(Another aspect of the story is the military's cooperation with right-wing bloggers in the persecution of Jamil Hussein, who is still being held without charges 1.5 years after the Malkin flying monkey brigade first fingered him as a terrorist-sympathizing reporter. The same tactics are even more effective against foreign journalists trying to operate in occupied Iraq.)

Glen concluded:

I would think Col. Boylan would have more important matters to attend to than writing me emails about how Alan Colmes is the "real talent" and how I lack the balls to go visit him in Iraq -- beginning with finding out who has been working secretly with right-wing outlets in the Beauchamp and Bilal Hussein matters, if he does not already know. The linchpin of a republic under civilian rule -- as well as faith in the armed services by a cross-section of Americans -- is an apolitical military. Like all other branches of the government intended to be apolitical, this linchpin is eroding under this administration, and that ought to be of far greater concern to Boylan and Petraeus than hurling petty insults.

Later, hilarious denials from the Colonel that he sent the email. Snotty, dismissive tone that

stands in stark contrast to the extremely eager and cooperative conduct in which they engage when passing on information to the right-wing blogs and pundits whose political views are apparently aligned with theirs. That takes us back to the first and most important point -- the U.S. military, which has an obligation to conduct itself apolitically and professionally, appears in many cases to be doing exactly the opposite.

All that's in Glen's blog linked above. John Cole posted here on the issue, highlighting the long-term danger to our democracy that this implies. Politics is being outsourced to veterans and officers who cannot be criticized, and a significant segment of the officer corps seems likely to go along with a brewing Dolchstosslegende should we ever abandon the occupation.

TNR retracted the story on a technicality -- it turned out one of the fact-checkers for it was STB's wife. According to their final account of the investigation showed, under weeks of pressure from both TNR and the Army, small cracks began to appear in the story. (Such as the fact that Iraqi driving liscences have no organ donor status about which to joke. STB admitted he added the detail as a joke.) There are real issues here about journalistic standards, but none of them touched the major points of the piece. But journalistic misdemeanors like these were a way for TNR to avoid the felony charge of treasonous reporting, to which they now tacitly pled guilty.

In the end, Army collaborated with right-wing bloggers to ruin personally and publicly an American citizen whose words could be taken as harmful to the cause of the occupation. STB's act of free speech (leaving aside, for the moment, his technical loss of constitutionally protected speech while in uniform) did not even contain political content. No political party was named, no individual politician or officer called on the carpet. No policies criticized. It was a war story -- a banal one, even, to those who have read the literature of war since 1914. But the administration well knows the anti-war and anti-occupation political consequences of showing the true face of these beasts. And so this media generation's war stories must be carefully controlled not to criticize war and occupation, but to support it.

True believers of the Army line consigned Thomas himself to the category of lair and denied him any present or future in national conversation. They gained another reason to ignore unpleasant stories in the "liberal media" of which they believed TNR to be a part. And they demonstrated to soldiers on the ground that they could only speak if their words matched propaganda.

And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is official truth. This allows them to control the message coming out of the occupation zone. They can then continue to justify the occupation by planting hopes of success and eliminating images of violence.

The 935

Countless lies that got us into Iraq? No, 935 of em.

And actually, if you check the study from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, the way they limited the study means there were actually thousands more. The 935 only includes (methodology link here):

• public statements from eight top officials (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Fleischer, McClellan, and Wolfowitz)
• statements about Iraq's possession of WMDs and its relationship to Al Quaeda
• statements for which dates are known

Most emphatically, the study OMITS "indirect lies" in which they do not directly say something false, but rather convey the same misinformation through implication or inference.

...and also does not include the thousands on thousands of cases in which other Republican warmongers, pseudo-Democratic cowards, and compliant media lapdogs repeated these lies. So the power of each lie is magnified.

This is the point Rachel Maddow just made on Countdown, who added that the timing of deception implies a concerted effort -- the number of lies spiked across the eight during strategic points at which they needed to sell the war.

And OMG it's even searchable!!

wingnut welfare wars!

FDL chuckles at how Regency's authors are suing them for not sharing enough of the "profits". I never knew the bloggers were in on the welfare. From an earlier FDL post on it:

When the wingnuts chant their talking points like a bunch of tambourine-beaters at the airport, they want to be paid for their efforts. And Pajamas Media was set up to do just that. They received by some accounts $7 million dollars to subsidize 70 right wing bloggers, and if you look at their sites there are no ads, many don’t even identify their affiliation with a logo. Look at some full-on loon like the Confederate Yankee who earns his/her 800 hits a day by having seizures over Google’s attempts to mock Christmas with Jesus butt plugs. The General will easily draw twenty times the traffic with his rapier-witted takedown, but the Confederate Yankee probably earns a lot more money than the General. These illiterate zeros are being paid out of principal, not out of any ad revenues. They are all Armstrong Williams.

Ha. But it's an interesting point on how successful they've been spreading their message. I guess they have more money than we do :(

EDIT: Regnery. All this time and I just read it right for the first time. Not Regency, Regnery. Lol.

Godwin's Law overdrive

From Orcinus, reports on the recent right-wing surge in 'leftists are Nazis' rhetoric. Sara describes how this is a two-step process: first, sever fascism from its right-wing roots; second, redefine it as a phenomenon of the left.

If the right can pull off this semantic trick, they win in two ways. First, we will no longer be able to have serious conversations -- like the ones we've had here for the past four-plus years -- about the very real ways in which American conservatives are pulling us toward genuine fascism. They'll have stolen away the language that will allow us to convict them of their crimes against democracy. We won't be able to measure their deeds by holding them up against those of previous right-wing authoritarians -- the comparisons will be simply impossible, because the definitions of the terms will be too murky to be useful. Or worse: they'll now mean something else entirely.

And evidently Oprah is a Nazi, according to radio host Bryan Suits, because she supports someone of the same race for president. So I guess by that logic all white people throughout American history are racists too?

'Shock Troop' supported

TNR did their investigation, the story held up.

I found the last bit rather revealing:

Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.

And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is government propaganda. Like how they banned soldier blogs. That's their goal in all this.

from military mouthpiece to Al Jazeera correspondant

This guy's got his propaganda bases covered! j/k -- the point is that Al Jazeera may be more of a traditional and legitimate news organization than the current state of the US media.

Another big point is how enmeshed the US military has gotten with Hollywood and the media. They had a $200,000 set for the generals to give briefings from.

As with many other things, the Bush administration broke with tradition and made the military a branch of civilian propaganda. This had not been done before, and had consequences:

[A]s a military spokesperson, you don’t talk about policy. You talk about the way you’re going to conduct an action, not why you’re going to conduct an action. So if someone were to ask me before the war, “Why are you going to invade Iraq?” -- and reporters did -- the only honest answer I could give is, “We’ll invade Iraq if the President orders us to. And we won’t if he doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose our battles.” That way, it’s left to a politician in a suit behind a podium at the White House to explain why they made that decision.

But instead, what we did, we had a Republican operative who was put in charge of our office, displacing a colonel that had started doing media liaison when this Republican operative was about probably five years old. And what this guy knew how to do was run a campaign, and so we were run like a political campaign. And the first step in that political campaign was to sell the product, and that was sell the invasion. So they gave the reasons down to the young troops, guys like me, to go out to reporters and give the reasons we’re going to invade a sovereign nation.

Here’s the problem: the reporters in no way had the latitude to ask someone in uniform a critical question. I mean, on MSNBC their coverage was actually packaged with a banner that said, “Our hearts are with you.” So when I’m the young troop in uniform on screen, and the viewer sees “Our hearts are with you,” do you think the reporter’s going to ask me a critical question? Of course not. But I’m out there giving political answers. I’m out there saying, “We’re going to invade Iraq” -- and this was the real catch: they would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up.

So it was part and parcel of selling the war to the public, using a media it knew would be deferential to uniformed troops. Use the troops as your salesmen, and the media will bend over backwards to be nice to them, even if it means uncritically reporting administration propaganda. As brilliant as it is antidemocratic and evil. And sad.

tag clouds for first republican debate

Pollster.com had done this for the democratic debate and it was interesting. here's the republican side from last night's opening clusterfuck 2008.

I was joking last night before even seeing these that Gilmore's would show "consistent conservative" pretty prominently. Looks like I was right! (Though I overestimated his message discipline - he had too many equally weighted words for the consistent conservative message to come through as prominently as I thought. Calls into question the true utility of the tag cloud though... as while he was speaking, at least to me, these words, along with other con- words for thematic effect, came up so much as to be laughable.)

Contrast that to Rudy "Did I say I was mayor of New York" Guliani and Mitt "America and Americans" Romney. Overall, a nightmarish field of crazy and crazier, with nobody except earnest libertarian oddball Ron Paul having any kind of critique of the way things have been going. To look at them, you get only sunny optimism.