Something digby said caught my eye:
From the sound of Gibbs's comments this morning, I'm fairly sure he wasn't speaking out of school yesterday. They're working the refs. I would guess they see some evidence of creeping Maddowism among the Village cognoscenti and the big liberal donors. I would also guess that it's going to have some effect, at least in the short term. Certainly people like Ruth Marcus will be well rewarded for drawing the proper lines.
And what is Maddowism? Well, not falling for the shiny object routine, for one thing. As in seeing that the story was the the run-amok war, not the run-away general. They're trying to get back on track with Patreaus reinstituting the Forever War, and they definitely don't want more Maddow-style coverage on that front, or any other one, thank you very much.
More basically, Maddowism is not Joe Kleinism. Your typical Versailles liberal doesn't actually stand for anything, and mostly just exists as a foil for conservatives. Hence, Joe Klein => Joke Line.
This is pretty much a trickle-down consequence from how the big money boys have kept Democrats like Ben Nelson around on life support for when they need some cover, as described in the new paper by Hacker & Pierson, "Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States", that I quoted from yesterday:
The need of the Democrats to respond to this formidable organizational machine encouraged them to adopt a more accommodative stance toward business. And business money did flow to Democrats, though in different ways and for different reasons. If money to the GOP was an investment, money to Democrats was a form of insurance. Revealingly, the money went largely to individuals rather than to the party as an organization. It was destined for the powerful and "moderates."
What we're talking about, quite simply, is the difference between "reality" as defined by the top 1% or 0.01% of the income pyramid and reality as defined by all of us: The reality in which thousands of street lights are being turned off all across America, tens of thousands of teachers, cops and firefighters are being fired or furloughed, and roads are de-paved and turned into gravel.
In short, the enemy isn't you and me, dear reader. We just don't matter that much. The enemy is reality itself, and the only way to keep it at bay is to intimidate those who might carelessly start to talk about it. Krugman's been doing it for years, and he's not about to shut up. Now Arianna Huffington has a new book coming out, and she's using her formidable website to draw attention to it: Third World America: Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class...and the Solutions.
In the Barack Obama/Robert Gibbs/Joke Line world, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are "Great Americans" precisely because they helped gut around $100 billion of stimulus funds that would have helped state and local governments stay afloat. It was called "buy-partisanship"
But in the Paul Krugman/Arriana Huffington/(and, increasingly) Rachel Maddow world, not so much. In that world--the real word--what matters is the real world, not the make-believe milkmaid & shepard fantasies of Versailles.
And that is the enemy that Gibbs was lashing out against.
You don't get a whole lot of credit for passing the largest undersized stimulus program that failed to halt the collapse of American civilization. Even Gibbs knows that. Heck, even Obama does.
p.s.
Democracy Now! this morning had a segment, "As Gibbs Attacks Progressive Critics, ACLU Says Obama White House Enshrining Bush-Era Policies":
As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacks progressives for comparing President Obama's polices to George W. Bush's, we look at a new ACLU report on how the Obama administration is permanently enshrining into law many of President Bush's most controversial policies. The report, "Establishing a New Normal," warns: "There is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration."
So, in one sense, at least, worse than the Bush Administration.
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