Moises Saman for The New York Times An Afghan shepherd on the outskirts of the southern city of Kandahar in August. In recent months, security has deteriorated in the city, which was once the de facto capital of the Taliban.

Afghanistan Is in Its Worst Shape Since 2001, European Diplomat Says

GENEVA — One of the most experienced Western envoys in Afghanistan said Sunday that conditions there had become the worst since 2001. He urged a concerted American and foreign response, even before a new American administration took office, to avoid "a very hot winter for all of us."

The envoy, Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat with eight years' experience in Afghanistan, especially criticized the growing number of civilian deaths in attacks by American and international forces.

Those deaths have created "a great deal of antipathy" and widened the distance between the Afghan government and citizens, he said here at an annual review of global strategy organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Mr. Vendrell recently stepped down as the European Union envoy in Kabul.

The United States military is investigating an assertion by villagers in western Afghanistan that some 90 men, women and children died in a missile attack on Aug. 22. The Afghan government and a United Nations investigation have backed that assertion, but American officers have said that only seven civilians were killed.

Mr. Vendrell warned that the situation was precarious among the Pashtun tribes who live mainly in southern Afghanistan, bordering Pakistan. He also said that the Taliban-led insurgency had spread not only to the east but also close to Kabul and, in pockets, to the north and west, hitherto relatively peaceful.

While only a minority of Pashtuns actively support the Taliban, he said, most Pashtuns "are sitting on the fence to see who is going to be the winner."

Because the country faces a number of problems — the rising cost of food and fuel, the deterioration in security and what Mr. Vendrell called the international community's failure to engage either the Taliban or regional powers like Pakistan, Iran and India in the search for solutions — Afghanistan could be facing "a very cold winter" that threatened to become "a very hot winter for all of us," he said.

He urged that Afghan authorities and foreign agencies follow up any military successes against the Taliban with concrete assistance to convince local citizens that Westerners and the Kabul government can deliver security and at least some well-being.

Mr. Vendrell bluntly recited what he called a long series of foreign mistakes in Afghanistan. While he played a leading role in the conference in Bonn, Germany, that set up the post-Taliban government, he said Sunday that the "first great mistake" made in 2001 was holding that conference. By the time the Bonn talks took place, he said, Northern Alliance warlords and their allies already controlled two-thirds of Afghanistan, making their rule a "fait accompli."

In addition, he said, the United States and its allies placed too much faith in President Hamid Karzai and did too little to ensure that his government had a monopoly of force, with a strong police force and other institutions.

"We thought we had found a miracle man," Mr. Vendrell said, alluding to Mr. Karzai without naming him.

"Miracle men do not exist. Too much responsibility without power was invested in this person," he said.

Mr. Vendrell's audience included dozens of security and foreign policy specialists, as well as a smattering of American military officers and some government ministers, including Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister. His alarm about Afghanistan and Pakistan was echoed in conversations at the conference.

Mr. Vendrell said that nevertheless it was time not to abandon Afghanistan but to redouble efforts there, both military efforts and those to build up civilian institutions and ensure that elections are held next year. In particular, he said, the United States must develop clear standards to govern the detention of hundreds of Afghans it holds without trial.

"This is not the time to leave; we are not destined to fail, but we are far from succeeding," he concluded.

----

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/a-nation-of-village-idiot_b_127340.html

James Moore

A Nation of Village Idiots

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses. Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures.

Let's just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that's more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of money would also pay for health care for every man, woman, and child in America for at least six months.

How did we get here?

That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.

This isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.

And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done slinging their gold card guts about the halls of congress, every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit.

Gramm didn't just make a fairy tale world for Wall Street, though. He included in his bill a provision that prevented the regulation of energy trading markets, which led us to the Enron collapse. There was no collapse of the house of Gramm, however, because his wife Wendy, who once headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took a job on the Enron board that provided almost $2 million to their household kitty. And why not? Wendy got a CFTC rule passed that kept the federal government from regulating energy futures contracts at Enron.

If John McCain gets elected and chooses Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, which many politico types see as likely, they will be able to talk about the good old days when Gramm was in congress and McCain was in the senate and they were in the midst of the Savings and Loan crisis.

The S and L scandal, which may look precious when compared to our present cascade of problems, isn't hard to understand, either. But it is impossible to take John McCain seriously on our current financial Armageddon since he was dabbling in the historic collapse of 747 S&Ls that occurred during Ronald Reagan's era. In the early 80s under the Republican president, congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in much the same way that Gramm made sure there were no laws hindering our current financial malefactors on Wall Street. S&Ls simply lobbied until they had less regulation and then began making rampant, unsound investments.

The guy who was going the wildest with financial freedom was Charles Keating, who headed up Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. Because the S&L industry had managed to get congress to increase FDIC insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 on deposits, the irresponsible investing of people like Keating began to put taxpayer insurance funds at great risk of loss. Keating placed money in junk bonds and questionable real estate projects and because so many other S&Ls started acting the same way the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) began to push for a regulation that limited these dangerous speculative "direct" investments to 10% of an S&L's assets.

And Keating didn't like it; he called on a private economist named Alan Greenspan, who promptly produced a study saying that there was no danger in "direct" investments.
But that didn't convince the FHLBB and as further scrutiny showed Lincoln Savings and Loan was making even more historically bad investment decisions, a federal investigation was launched.

So Keating called his home state senator John McCain.

McCain and four other US senators (known to history as the Keating Five) met with Edwin Gray, then chairman of the FHLBB. McCain had been hesitant to attend but had reportedly been called a "wimp" behind his back by Keating. The message to the FHLBB and Gray from the Keating Five was to lay off Lincoln and cool the investigation. Gray and the FHLBB did not relent but Lincoln stayed in business until 1989 when it collapsed with the rest of the S&L industry. The life savings of more than 20,000 elderly investors disappeared with the failure of Lincoln. Keating went to prison for five years.

Charles Keating was John McCain's pal. They met in 1981 and Keating dumped $112,000 in the McCain campaign bank accounts between '82 and '87. A year before McCain met with the FHLBB regulators, his wife Cindy and her father, according to newspaper reports at the time, invested about $360,000 in one of Keating's shopping centers. The Arizona Republic reported McCain and his wife and their babysitter took nine trips on Keating's private jet to the Bahamas to stay at the S&L liar's decadent Cat Cay resort. The senator didn't pay Keating back for the plane rides until years later when he was under investigation.

McCain wasn't found guilty of anything but bad judgment, which is an historic understatement. Republicans, who led deregulation of the S&L industry, delayed the bailout until after the 1988 election to make sure George H. W. won the White House. The cost to taxpayers for helping these 747 bad actors in the S&L industry was finally estimated at $1.4 trillion. If the bailout had begun in 1986 instead of after the presidential election, the cost would have been contained at $20 billion.

And now the Republicans who engineered our present crisis and got us into the S&L debacle of the 80s are before us saying the markets need regulation. No, actually, they don't need regulation. Why don't you Republican capitalists who believe in the free markets get out of the damned way and let them work and allow these various financial nuthouses be crushed by the weight of their own stupidity? When it is all over, we'll have sane and sober people create laws to make sure it doesn't happen again, assuming we survive this chaos.

Also, while you are handing out our tax money to idiots on Wall Street, save a little of the long green for the unemployed auto and construction workers and all of the other people who have lost their jobs because you were too stupid to notice what Phil Gramm was doing and you were convinced everything was going to be just fine because the markets work.

These, then, are the people -- the Republicans -- who want to run our government for four more years. John McCain isn't just one of them. He rides their jets. He takes their campaign donations. He makes them his campaign advisors. And he tells us to trust him.

He must think we are a nation of village idiots.

Hell, maybe we are.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/a-nation-of-village-idiot_b_127340.html

Reign of Counterterror

"How real is this nuclear terrorism thing?" That is the oddly glib question, according to a top American intelligence official, posed by George W. Bush during a 2006 White House briefing. That the president was still unsure of its answer, fully five years after Sept. 11, is more than a little unsettling.

Patrick Thomas

That's because, in Ron Suskind's account, the threat is very real, but our under­standing of it is dangerously limited. "The Way of the World" has commanded headlines with its explosive (and controversial) charges of extreme Bush administration malfeasance — including still more misuse of prewar intelligence and an alleged forgery scheme that Suskind calls possible grounds for impeachment. But these are increasingly matters for the historical record. At the heart of Suskind's story is a potentially existential threat to the United States in the here and now. It is "what may be humanity's last great race," as he puts it — one between civilized governments and radical terrorists, with the prize being a mushroom cloud in an American city, or its merciful absence.

Suskind approaches this terrible theme in distinctly human terms. The rare writer who combines excellent reporting with a knack for novelistic writing about real people, he skillfully traces several inter­woven stories of cultural clashes and cross-pollination, all of them pursuing the question of whether America and the Muslim world can ever look past their differences and find understanding.

Toward that end, we follow the story of a troubled Afghan exchange student in Colorado who reels at the sight of buxom cheerleaders and people cohabiting with dogs, which he was raised to consider vermin. We meet an idealistic Pakistani émigré, living in Washington, whose admiration for America is cruelly tested after a misunderstanding involving the presidential motorcade leads to his bruising detention and a sneering interrogation by the Secret Service. There is the dogged American lawyer who represents a Libyan imprisoned at Guantánamo on the basis of evidence first dismissed as feeble and then reclassified, without explanation, as grounds for confinement. And we follow Benazir Bhutto through the final months leading to her assassination in December, as she pleads in vain with the Bush administration to provide her with more support in her fight for democracy in Pakistan.

Each story speaks to the crosswinds of culture and politics that will determine the course of history and the role of America in the world. But none give the book quite as much urgency as Suskind's portrait of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. case officer and senior Department of Energy official who monitors the global black market in nuclear materials that terrorists might use to fashion a crude device capable of killing tens of thousands. Mowatt-Larssen's tale of government inaction on this score is nothing short of chilling. He's the one who recounts Bush's clueless question about "this nuclear terrorism thing," as well as another White House meeting so unproductive that this grizzled spook left in a state of nausea.

Having concluded that only a shock to the national psyche can force real action, Mowatt-Larssen dreams up a plan befitting a Tom Clancy novel: the "Armageddon Test," a scheme to dispatch undercover teams around the world to purchase enough black-market nuclear material for a working bomb. The teams would then smuggle their terrible bounty onto American soil and unveil it, thereby demonstrating just how real the threat is. (The project never gets off the ground, thanks in part to bureaucratic inertia that leads Mowatt-Larssen to contemplate outsourcing the mission to private contractors.)

Much like Suskind's previous books about the Bush administration, "The Price of Loyalty" and "The One Percent Doctrine," "The Way of the World," though occasionally breathless, is a reportorial feat — particularly when it comes to chronicling the internal machinations of the administration's national security team. For example, Suskind relates how, in the summer of 2006, American officials exposed a terrorist cell apparently plotting to blow up several airliners in midflight. His account suggests that Bush's action was motivated less by fear of an imminent attack (British officials, who opposed the arrests, argued that the plot was far from complete) than by a desire to make headlines before the midterm elections.

More startling are Suskind's revelations about the Iraq war and the handling of prewar intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. In one instance, Suskind says that denials by the foreign minister of Iraq, Naji Sabri, that his country possessed W.M.D. were simply rewritten — "almost certainly altered under pressure from Washington," Suskind writes — into a false assertion that Sabri had substantiated suspicions about active Iraqi biological and nuclear programs.

Even more disturbing is the story of a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Tahir Jalil Habbush. Suskind describes in gripping detail secret meetings between Habbush and British intelligence in January and February of 2003. Habbush insisted that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs but would not publicly admit it, so as to maintain a facade of deterrence against regional rivals like Iran. Not only did the White House dismiss Habbush's statements, Suskind writes, but an irritated Bush even asked whether the Iraqi could be asked for "something we can use to help us make our case." A subsequent $5 million C.I.A. payment to Habbush, disclosed by Suskind, has the smell of hush money.

Then comes what may be the ultimate bombshell: that the White House in­structed the C.I.A. to forge a letter, backdated to July 2001, stating that the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had trained in Iraq and, furthermore, that Iraq had received suspicious shipments (presumably of yellowcake) from Niger with Al Qaeda's help. The letter was to be written and signed by Habbush on Iraqi government station­ery and addressed to Hussein himself. This preposterously convenient summary of what a perfect case for war might look like almost resembled some wry gag from The Onion. But at the end of 2003 the letter did, in fact, turn up in a British newspaper, before seeping into the American media.

Suskind does not establish who dreamed up this pernicious document. But he says one of his sources, a former senior C.I.A. operative named Robert Richer, recalls being ordered directly by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to have Habbush transcribe it himself from a draft produced by the White House. ­Richer even remembers "the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written," as Suskind puts it. Since the book's release, however, Tenet, Richer himself and another key source have adamantly denied that such a thing occurred. (Tenet also denies that Habbush's prewar claims were muffled.)

Even in the context of the past seven years, the stupid brazenness of a forged letter drafted on White House stationery does test credulity. But any claims made by Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Pulitzer Prize winner, should not be casually dismissed. That no credible challenges have been made to numerous other scoops in his book suggests an attempted covering of exposed der­rières. Still, his release of partial transcripts from recorded interviews with Richer has not definitively affirmed his reporting.

Suskind's point isn't about proving liabil­ity. Rather, the Habbush episodes, if accurate, illustrate a creeping amorality in the way America has managed its war on terror. As our moral standing suffers, so does our ability to shame other nations into cracking down on their nuclear black markets. And so does our battle for the hearts and minds of people like the Afghan exchange student, the Pakistani émigré, the possibly innocent Guantánamo detainee and the followers of Benazir Bhutto. Their conclusions about America may determine whether Rolf Mowatt-Larssen will have the pleasure of being remembered as a ­Chicken Little, or will experience the horror of becoming a prophet of atomic disaster.

Privileging the lie

Earlier this week, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote that there was "[n]o blowback" against the McCain campaign for its repeated false claims about Sarah Palin's role in stopping the Bridge to Nowhere. Ambinder explained:

[T]he electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent. It's probably an artifact of twenty years' worth of campaign advertisements and has something to do with the way consumers process news.

Ambinder is completely wrong. First, the electorate does penalize campaigns for deliberate distortions ... sometimes.

This isn't conjecture. We need only look back at 2000 to see a campaign in which the electorate seemed to penalize a candidate for distortions.

Exit polls showed that, by a large margin, a plurality of voters identified the candidates' honesty and trustworthiness as the quality most important to them in deciding how to vote. Of the voters who thought honesty was the most important quality, 80 percent voted for George W. Bush; only 15 percent voted for Al Gore.

A whopping 74 percent thought "Gore would say anything to get elected," compared to 58 percent who thought the same about Bush. Sixty percent thought Gore attacked Bush "unfairly," while only 49 percent thought Bush attacked Gore unfairly.

In an election that came down to a handful of votes, the perception of Gore as less honest than Bush and more willing to say anything to get elected may well have been determinative.

So, why did Gore get "blowback" from voters for (supposedly) being dishonest -- and why isn't John McCain facing similar blowback?

Because there is a clear difference in the way the media have portrayed the two candidates.

A dominant theme of campaign coverage in 2000 -- perhaps thedominant theme -- was that Al Gore was a liar, a serial exaggerator, and a vicious, power-hungry candidate willing to say and do anything to get elected. (The evidence to support this theme was largely fabricated -- and not merely by the Republicans, but by the news media, particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post.)

Jane Hall explained in the September/October 2000 issue ofColumbia Journalism Review:

The underlying message of all of these stories was clear: Al Gore is a lying politician who will do anything to get elected -- a theme happily echoed by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Gore's motives are frequently questioned, frequently framed in the most negative light -- even in the lead of straight-news stories from some of the most respected and influential news organizations.

[...]

A new study by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism underscores this. Examining 2,400 newspaper, TV, and Internet stories in five different weeks between February and June, researchers found that a whopping 76 percent of the coverage included one of two themes: that Gore lies and exaggerates or is marred by scandal.

[...]

The substance of what Gore has been saying in speeches around the country often has been wrapped in reporters' cynical language that effectively casts doubt about his motives before he even opens his mouth.

The frame of the news reports about Gore's (not really) false claims was Al Gore is a liar, he exaggerates, he'll say anything to win. Is it any wonder voters tended to think Al Gore would say anything to win? Is it any wonder voters who put a great deal of value on honesty chose Bush?

The frame of most news reports about false claims made by McCain (and Palin and their staff) is very different. The frame isn't John McCain is lying again; it is John McCain said something; how will Barack Obama respond? Some of those news reports get around to mentioning that McCain's claim isn't true -- but those passing mentions hardly matter. They aren't the dominant theme of the report, so they don't stick in the minds of readers and viewers.

Here's an example: Yesterday, The Washington Post ran an article about McCain's attacks on Obama, including his false charge that Obama's use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig" was a sexist reference to Sarah Palin. Paragraphs 1, 5, 6, and 7 contained the allegation in various forms. Paragraphs 9 and 10 were about McCain allies saying the attacks were working. Paragraph 11 finally brought the first indication that the attack wasn't true.

Constructing the article that way privileges the false claim. Readers have it drummed into their heads, over and over again, before they finally see a fleeting suggestion that it isn't true.

So how else could the Post have constructed that article? Well, the article could have begun not with an unchallenged recitation of McCain's false claim, but with a very different frame: "John McCain launched another dishonest attack on Barack Obama, the latest in a long line of claims that have been debunked and denounced by neutral observers as false, misleading, and in some cases, lies." It could have gone on to detail the growing body of evidence that McCain is running a dishonest campaign and to note that McCain risks being seen as a serial liar who will say anything to get elected.

Sound judgmental? Maybe. But it's quite consistent with coverage of Al Gore in 2000 -- coverage about things he said that were not actually false.

Besides, news organizations make judgments all the time. The Washington Post made the judgment that the best way to report the story would be to repeat the false allegation in four separate paragraphs before finally, 11 paragraphs into the story, giving some indication that it was false. That's supposed to be better, or more appropriate, or more ethical than making the judgment that the most important thing about McCain's attack was that it was false? Please. That's absurd. That doesn't reflect any principle or standard of good journalism, it just reflects the media's steadfast belief that John McCain is a straight-talker, no matter how much he says things that aren't true -- and their fearful refusal to risk the wrath of Mark Salter and the army of Republican operatives who will attack them for "bias" if they don't frame the story in a way favorable to their candidate.

And that's just what happened this week. Journalists who knew McCain's "lipstick on a pig" charge was pure bunk framed their reports about it as though it might be true -- and as though the important thing was not one campaign lying about the other, but whether the lies would be effective. The Washington Post article described above is but one example of many. Here's another -- a small one, but illustrative of the media's approach to McCain's false charges. MSNBC.com ran an online poll asking if "Sen. Barack Obama went too far with his 'lipstick on a pig' remark." Readers were offered just three choices:

• Yes, he has crossed the line this time.
• No, this is just part of the rough-and-tumble of political campaigning.
• I don't know.

The poll was about Obama's conduct, rather than McCain's conduct in launching a false attack. It privileged McCain's false claim, rather than punishing it. And it didn't even give people an option that reflected the truth: There was nothing "rough-and-tumble" about Obama's comments; John McCain was dishonestly attacking him.

On Wednesday, MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall offered viewers another poll: "Do you think Obama's lipstick comments were aimed at Palin?" Since Obama's comments obviously were not aimed at Palin, you might think they would have instead run a poll asking, "Do you think John McCain is lying about Barack Obama?" But no: They kept their focus on Obama's conduct.

And that's what happened for much of the week. Journalists who knew McCain's charge did not have merit pretended that was an open question; television segments and newspaper articles were devoted to the question of whether Obama had made a sexist comment, rather than whether McCain was lying.

But this is not a new development. It has been going on for weeks, if not longer. On August 1, I noted that despite a lengthy list of news organizations and independent organizations that had debunked false claims by McCain and his campaign, the media were repeating the claims over and over:

All week, McCain's attacks have been driving news coverage. Those same news organizations that have declared McCain's charges false have given them an extraordinary amount of attention, repeating them over and over. They have adopted the premises of the McCain attacks even as they acknowledge the attacks are based on false claims. The media narrative of the week has not been, as you might expect, that John McCain's apparent dishonesty may hurt him with voters. Instead, the media's basic approach has been to debunk McCain's attacks once, then run a dozen stories about how the attacks are sticking, how the "emerging narrative" will hurt Obama.

But attacks don't just stick and narratives don't just emerge. The only reason that the topic of the week was whether Obama is presumptuous instead of whether McCain is a liar who will do anything to get elected is that the news media decided to make Obama's purported flaws the topic of the week -- even after debunking the charges upon which the characterization is based. It's as though the news media -- so concerned about lies (that weren't really lies) in 2000 -- have suddenly decided that it doesn't matter that the McCain campaign is launching false attack after false attack. That it's the kind of thing you note once, then adopt the premise of the attack.

Here's how the National Journal's John Mercurio described the dynamic currently at play:

John McCain's campaign recently declared that the sky is red, with green and yellow polka dots. Armed with binders full of research and a New York Times op-ed, Barack Obama angrily jabbed his finger at the sky and countered that it is blue. McCain's campaign accused Obama of anti-skyism. Cable TV talkers spent the next 48 hours debating the color of the sky and Obama's anti-skyist tendencies.

Remember: Al Gore said one time, "During my time in Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" -- and the media ran wild, belittling him for falsely claiming to have invented the Internet (he didn't; he correctly noted that he played a key role in fighting for funding for its development, an accomplishment acknowledged by even Newt Gingrich). They belittled him as a liar and an exaggerator throughout the campaign based on that comment -- and they've done it for years ever since.

By comparison, Think Progress has been keeping track of how often McCain, Palin, and their campaign's surrogates falsely claim that Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, and they had found 27 such claims through Wednesday.

Al Gore made his Internet comment one time -- a comment that wasn't even false -- and was relentlessly ridiculed as a liar by the media.

Just imagine what would have happened if he had said it 27 times. Imagine how the media would have reacted if he kept exaggerating his accomplishments the same way even after having been called on it.

And yet even this week, amid widespread media recognition that McCain and his campaign aren't telling the truth about themselves or their opponent, you can still turn on CNN and see journalists dutifully referring to McCain riding the "Straight Talk Express." And over on MSNBC, viewers saw Chris Matthews insist that John McCain would not personally engage in the false attacks his campaign was leveling.Ridiculous: First, McCain is responsible for what his campaign does -- particularly when the "something" in question consists of a multi-day offensive involving a surrogate operation and an advertisement. Second, McCain himself made the false claim that Obama had engaged in a personal attack with his "lipstick on a pig" comment. But that's the way the media treat McCain: Even when they know his claims are false, they refer to "straight talk" and insist that he wouldn't throw "slime" (Matthews' word) like that.

Defending his statement that there isn't voter backlash against McCain's false claims, Marc Ambinder wrote:

And, of course, though the press has pointed out the Bridge to Nowhere exagerration ever since it was uncovered, it must somehow be the press's fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don't realize that he's a lying liar, or whatever.

Well, yes, it is the press's fault, in large part.

First, Ambinder overstated the extent to which the media had pointed out McCain/Palin's Bridge to Nowhere falsehood, as Media Mattersillustrated this week. It isn't enough to debunk a false claim some of the times that you report it. The media must do so every time they report the claim.

Second, the way in which falsehoods are debunked is crucial. When a candidate makes a false claim, reporters can respond one of three ways:

• They can ignore it, on the basis that a false claim is unworthy of attention.
• They can adopt the false claim as the basis of their report, as they did with this week's stories about whether or not Barack Obama had made a sexist comment about Sarah Palin.
• They can produce a report centered on the fact that the candidate is saying something that is untrue. If it is the latest of many falsehoods, they can indicate that. If the candidate is telling more and larger falsehoods than the opposition, they can make that clear. In short, they can make the lack of credibility of the person making the false claim the theme of their coverage.

The first option privileges the lie by allowing a candidate to run around saying things that are not true -- but at least it does not help spread the lie further.

The second option -- even if it includes mention of the fact that the claim is false -- privileges the lie a great deal by helping the candidate spread the false claims. At the end of the day, what most people take away from this week's media coverage of the lipstick flap is likely that there is some controversy around whether Barack Obama made a sexist comment about Sarah Palin. That's a clear advantage to McCain -- and thus the media's handling of the episode has rewarded his falsehood.

The third option punishes the falsehood. If you think the media's job is to bring their readers and viewers the truth, this is obviously the best of the three options.

This is where some will say "but then reporters will be taking sides."

And there is some truth to that: They'll be taking the truth's side.

Reporters "take sides" with everything they do. Everything they do involves a choice, involves a decision that X is more important than Y. When they report a lie five times before reporting the fact that it is false, they are taking the lie's side.

The question isn't whether reporters should "take sides" -- they can't possibly avoid taking sides.

The only question is whether they will side with truth or with fiction.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200809120021?f=h_top