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Mon Mar-12-07 08:13 AM
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It's time to call James Carville out on his marriage to Mary Matalin!

Look---me and my wife have plenty of disagreements and we're not exactly Idealogical soul mates....BUT my God.... if my wife even closely uttered the hate filled spewed lies that pour out of Mary Matalins mouth, there aint no way that I would call her my wife.

How could Carville live with such an evil person---a person that is just as complicit as anyone who walk the halls of the Bush administration for orchestrating the lies that sent thousands of innocent people to their deaths.

I read something that Digby posted yesterday that was written by Colin McEnroe. I knew about the Carville/Russert connection months ago--- but me-thinks that the connection is much more than a sports show.

From Digby:

One of the most interesting things about following the Connecticut senate race last summer was becoming exposed to the local media. One stand-out was Colin McEnroe, who has written the piece that should have been written by a top flight national columnist except they are so in the tank, that I'm not sure they even understand the issue much less have the integrity to write something about it:

During the trial of Scooter "I. Lewis" Libby, the notes of Cathie Martin were flashed up on a courtroom screen. Martin was an aide to Vice President Darth Vader, I mean Dick Cheney, and her notes concerned ways in which Cheney might combat the notion that the White House had not been honest about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. As option number one, Martin wrote "MTP-VP," meaning either that the Vice President should aim his Death Star at some hapless planet and "massacre their people" or, more likely, that the Vice President should appear on the program you are not going to watch today.

Martin then did a pros and cons notation about this strategy. On the pro side she wrote "control message."

Really? That's the best thing about sending Vice President Cheney on "Meet the Press?" That you can control the message you want to get out? Interesting.

But then there were more notes presented at the trial. These notes were taken by Libby himself about a conversation he had with Cheney adviser Mary Matalin about how to deal with that meddlesome NBC fellow Chris Matthews. "Call Tim. He hates Chris - he needs to know it all," was the advice from Matalin jotted down by Libby.

Hmmm. A Cheney adviser knows that NBC's Russert hates NBC's Matthews and that Russert will be helpful.

A couple of connectable dots involve Matalin's husband, James Carville, and Russert's son, Luke, who together launched a satellite radio sports talk show called "60/20," a reference to their respective age groups, apparently because the title "A Giant Talking Adder and an Unqualified Stripling With a Famous Dad Discuss Big Strong Sweaty Men" was already taken by the Sci-Fi Channel.

Tim Russert and Carville actually promoted the sports show on "Meet the Press" (where Carville and Matalin regularly appear) without revealing that Luke Russert was the second host, as if that somehow removed the taint of hand-in-glove favoritism from this plug.

So Russert gets his kid a fancy gig with a famous and wired guy like Carville. It hardly comes as a surprise to think that Carville's wife feels she has a little inside advantage in playing Russert for Cheney's benefit.

But wait. There's more.

When Russert was first subpoenaed, in 2004, to speak to the grand jury in the Libby case, he and NBC made a great show of fighting to quash that subpoena because, in the words of NBC News president Neil Shapiro, "The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news." This quote appeared in a "story" on the MSNBC website about NBC's brave resistance.

Stirring words. Only one problem. It emerged at trial that Russert spoke freely to an FBI agent about this whole matter the first time he was ever contacted. The whole pageant of refusing to cooperate was kind of a charade. He had already cooperated. I mean, shouldn't the story MSNBC ran about NBC's commitment to the American public have explained that Russert compromised at least some of that commitment the first chance he got?

OK. Just a little more.

In his own trial testimony, Russert explained his own unique approach to the concept of "off the record" conversations with public officials. Russert said public officials do not have to ask to go off the record with him. They are always presumptively off the record. Then, if he wants to get them on the record, he revisits the point and asks them to go public.

This is a wonderful, generous strategy, and the only problem with it is that it represents a complete inversion of the standard operating practices of journalism. Every reporter who works at this newspaper, and pretty much every reporter professionally employed at any other reputable organ of the press has been instructed to do the opposite: assume that every utterance is on the record unless the utterer has explicitly gone off the record before uttering.

People who deal with the press are expected to know that.

You're not even allowed to say, "The U.S. government blew up Pluto in November of last year, but that's off the record," although some reporters will give you the NBA continuation rule if you don't pause for breath anywhere in there.

A gray area would be something like, "The real Zodiac killer was - and this is off the record - Andy Rooney." That's probably a legitimate off the record statement.

But Russert's policy is one of his own invention, and it's the kind of policy you'd have if you prized your cozy relationship with powerful people more highly than you prized your role as a reporter.

I mention all this because, here and there, you read comments about the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and how much he damaged the First Amendment by sweating a bunch of journalists. Please. It's more like he lanced some kind of infectious boil.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/lancing-boil-by-digby-one-of-most.html

Carville, this ex Ragin' Cajun is now nothing more than a beltway elite and he should should be exposed as one at every turn.

It's time to call James Carville out on his marriage to Mary Matalin!

That's perfect!!!