Glenn Greenwald on Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book, Game Change.
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 poring 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 is not a book about how conservative policies destroyed 3 trillion dollars of our national economic wealth. No. Its mostly unsubstantiated bits of rumors about John Edwards sex life and something Harry Reid said that was taken out of context. Its not about how Bush and Cheney committed treason by lying about WMD and make-believe terror connections. Nope its about the really spicy stuff that conservatives like Helperin and Drudge think are important.
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 little Versailles 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 how intensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations.
Rudy Giuliani lives in a wonderful world. Its all peaches and cream. A wonderland of sorts. Its not the real world, but if he wants to enjoy living his life, like most conservatives, in LaLa land that is his right, Giuliani still in denial about Bush-era terror attacks
After falsely claiming on Good Morning America that "[w]e had no domestic attacks under Bush," Rudy Giuliani stated during CNN's The Situation Room, "I did omit the words 'since September 11th.' I apologize for that. I should have put it in." However, Giuliani continued to ignore several domestic attacks that took place under Bush after 9/11 -- including the 2002 attack at the Los Angeles International Airport, the 2002 DC-area sniper shootings, and the 2006 SUV attack at the University of North Carolina - and dismissed the 2001 anthrax attacks, which were characterized by John Ashcroft as "a terrorist act," because, Giuliani said, "as far as we know, that was not done in the name of Islamic terrorism."
