Dan Hasn't Lost His Touch

Froomkin calls bullshit on all the Rahm love circulating in the media at the moment as only he can lol.

One Of The Best Answers EVAH!

Dan Froomkin was interviewed by "The Economist" whom asked him seven questions. His answer to question number 2 was one of the best I have seen about the state of journalism and what journalists should be doing.

DIA: Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Joe Klein Needs To Read This

Now that Joke Line has beclowned himself over the White House vs FoxNews story perhaps he should read this post from Dan Froomkin. Well actually I am pretty sure that as a Villager in good standing Joke Line won't change his stance because the script says all journos should say the White House is stupid for "picking this fight". But at least he will have some material to site once public sentiment turns and the decision to push back on FoxNews is seen as a smart one in hindsight and as usual he does his usual flip flop with the shift in the journalistic winds.

Are there any good journalists left in the mainstream media?

Excellent Advice

If there was one blogger who I would want President Obama to read I would be hard pressed to choose anyone other than Dan Froomkin. The reason for that is Froomkin is brutally honest and he doesn't pull any punches. Of course when it calls for he doesn't hesitate to praise when its warranted too. And another selling point is that he offers opinion on just about any policy position whether they be foreign or domestic policies and he is also honest about the political implications.

His newest post as editor over at the Huffington Post is like an open letter to President Obama and I hope he gets a chance to read it beween now and his press conference next week because it is chocked full of great advice and a realistic assessment of where Obama is right now on health care reform.

Obama could, I guess, back off on everything remotely controversial in his health care proposal, throw the public option and universal coverage and end-of-life counseling overboard, and try to get everyone to find common ground. But even that wouldn't appease his critics. They won't stop fighting just because he does. Their goal is for Obama to lose.

Alternately, Obama could commit himself to some specifics, call out his critics, and remind people why all this is so damned important.

Here's one thing he could say: I'm not going to chase after the crazies on the right anymore. I cannot do business with these people, try as I may. I reach out and they accuse me of being a socialist who wants to pull the plug on grandma.

He could bolster this argument with nearly endless examples of the extreme, vitriolic and outright balmy things leading Republicans have been saying about him and his plan lately. Heck, just yesterday, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe told a town hall audience that Obama is disarming the military, is destroying everything good about America and is determined to turn foreign terrorists loose on U.S. soil.

Non-fire-breathing Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein actually understated the case earlier this month, when he could finally take it no more and wrote:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers
on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so
disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan
political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any
pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists,
willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus
on one of its most serious domestic problems.

(Incidentally, one way for Obama to elegantly back away from his vain attempt to elicit something bipartisan from the Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" would be to focus attention on the thus-far largely ignored Senate health committee version of the bill.)

In terms of committing to specifics, Obama simply has no choice but to come down firmly on one side or the other regarding the public option.

He needs to explain precisely what the public option is and is not -- how it is not a government takeover of health care or even a government-run health care program, but rather a government-run insurance option that would provide an alternative to the private sector, solely for those individuals or small businesses who either don't have insurance now or want to find a better deal.

And if he decides to sacrifice the public option, he needs to explain both why he is doing that, and how, in its absence, there will be any accountability at all for the insurance industry.
He also needs to honestly and directly address the issue of how we're going to pay for all this. And if he's still committed to his original proposal to limit itemized tax deductions for the nation's highest earners to the same level they were during the Reagan years -- a proposal that Democrats in Congress called dead on arrival -- he needs to aggressively make his case and begin stiffening some of those Democratic spines.

And he needs to openly address the deals he has made with Big Pharma and other industry players. What were his intentions? What did he promise? What did he give up? Are the deals still in force? How does he think he can bridge the chasm between the interests of the health industry on one side and the American public on the other? Because he really can't. So who is going to take the haircut? Whose side is Obama really on?

And finally, Obama needs to remind people of the stakes -- of the reality that his batty critics simply can't deal with, a reality that is way scarier than "death panels." It's a reality in which millions of Americans can't afford to see a doctor when they're sick; in which people can't get insurance because they've been sick in the past; in which people get their coverage rescinded just when they need it; in which people lose insurance because they lost their jobs; in which people go bankrupt and lose their homes to pay their medical bills; in which people die -- yes, die -- because they can't afford the treatment they need, or their insurance carriers won't pay for it.

To some extent, I understand why Obama hasn't taken a more aggressive approach until now. After all, the nativist right is ready to pounce the minute he gives them a video clip that allows them to depict him as an "angry black man." But they'll pounce anyway. They've already pounced. They'll keep pouncing no matter what.

I agree with everything Froomkin put in this post, especially his call for President Obama to make it known where he stands on the public option either way, and he also has to come to realize that no matter what he does the wingnuts are still going to happen because that's all they know how to do.

Its time to cut bait and actually lead on health care reform and that means making definitive statements and standing behind the.

Some Things Just Never Get Old

Like Dan Froomkin calling bullshit on Dick Cheney and the media coverage of him.

Beautiful!

Welcome Home Dan!

Dan Froomkin starts off his blogging at Huffington Post with a bang.

"Our Fuzzy President Is About To Come Into Focus"

He comes out swinging with a skeptical eye at President Obama and dare I say calling "bullshit". I think we will fit in just fine at his new digs.

The End

Well not really, literally the end, but the end of Dan Froomkin's time with the Washington Post.

His last column:

Today's column is my last for The Washington Post. And the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to all you readers, e-mailers, commenters, questioners, Facebook friends and Twitterers for spending your time with me and engaging with me over the years. And thank you for the recent outpouring of support. It was extraordinarily uplifting, and I'm deeply grateful. If I ever had any doubt, your words have further inspired me to continue doing accountability journalism. My plan is to take a few weeks off before embarking upon my next endeavor -- but when I do, I hope you'll join me.

It's hard to summarize the past five and a half years. But I'll try.

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.
And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

So classy.

The Washington Post didn't deserve him...

Dan Froomkin PWNS The Kraut

Dan Froomkin takes apart his fellow Washington Post opinion columnist Charles Krauthammer's argument supporting torture that was published in their paper this morning. I suggest you go read the whole thing but I wanted to point out on part of Froomkin's column that I have said before and that I believe needs to be shouted from the hills.

For instance, he writes: "KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with 'soon you will know' -- meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now."

But as Scott Shane recently pointed out in the New York Times, with more than a little understatement: "Mr. Mohammed, captured on March 1, 2003, was waterboarded 183 times that month. That striking number, which would average out to six waterboardings a day, suggests that interrogators did not try a traditional, rapport-building approach for long before escalating to their most extreme tool."

We have been sold the story that Khalid Sheik Muhammed and others were tortured because they didn't respond to traditional interrogation techniques. In point of fact the OLC memos are supposed to give guidance that the torture techniques were supposed to use in an escalating fashion and that was a part of what was supposed to make it legal. But its obvious to anybody who is paying attention that there is simply no way in the hell that any traditional interrogation techniques were tried with KSM. In fact it appears that they didn't even try the lower forms of torture either and just went straight to waterboarding. And if there is one thing that will crack the legal justification for torturing these men I believe it would be proving that whether the OLC memos themselves were legal or not (which they weren't) they weren't followed anyway. That puts CIA contractors on the hook for torture and I just bet that they will start the ball rolling uphill to put blame exactly where it should be, on those in the Bush administration who ordered torture in the first place. At least I hope thats what ends up happening.