I ask you, why does the NY Times allow some of its writers to moonlight? For example, it should be obvious that “Kit” Seelye is drawing a second salary from the GOP. And yet (or is it because?) she gets to cover the top Democratic candidates. And by cover, we mean cover in slime—yet is it her slime? Seemingly not, since it seems to cover all the talking points of the GOP BlastFaxes so comprehensively.
She proved this beyond doubt during the 2000 election (just check out the Daily Howler archives, link to the left) but she seems intent on proving it again. Take the hit job she produced for Sunday’s Times. The hit couldn’t be crafted better by Karl Rove, endlessly ridiculing the “mentality of loyalists” and perfectly reproducing the GOP talking points that Clark is really a crypto-Republican – all designed to create dissension within the Democratic ranks and, if they can’t deny Clark the nomination, at least it stokes the fires of the Greenies on the left who abandoned responsibility to chase after the Ralph Nader’s vision of “winning by losing.”
And so Kit does her darnedest not only to mock the justified frustrations of Democrats who were robbed of the presidency, but also to try and sabotage the Democrats best candidate for taking that presidency back, through the use of hearsay, innuendo, and the tried and true technique she perfected against Gore, misrepresenting the very words of the candidate himself and then accusing him of “reinventing himself” when he attempts to clarify the media-created misperception.
Just look at this article—it obstensibly is about a campaign appearance, but the major themes can be boiled down to a) Clark is a Republican in Democratic clothing (who only chose the Dems because of his own rapacious ambition—after all, he voted for Reagan 20 years ago!) and b) that same overriding ambition has led Clark to “reinvent” himself – just like (surprise!) Al Gore!
So much for reporting on a campaign event…
Kit needs to find a new song to play, this one is getting old.
To Find Party, General Marched to His Own Drummer
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
published: October 5, 2003
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — It is like a code among die-hard Democrats, and Gen. Wesley K. Clark wanted to show that he understood it.
To a crowd of party loyalists, he declared that he voted for Al Gore in 2000, "and I'm proud that his campaign was a winning campaign." He added later, "George W. Bush will need brothers in 49 other states to take this election."
With that nod to the "we was robbed" mentality of loyalists still smarting over the disputed 2000 election [What is up with those CRAZY Dems?!? They are like so yesterday, hippies lost in time], General Clark — who declared his allegiance to the Democratic Party just one month ago — sought to bond on Friday with Democrats at a meeting here of the Democratic National Committee. But his record suggests he may have a hard time convincing some in his newly adopted party that he is one of them. [No, actually his record doesn’t suggest that, Kit does… but then I guess the press is never part of the story, right?]
He voted for Republicans Richard M. Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. General Clark's wife, Gertrude, worked for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, for more than a year, starting in 1994. At a Republican dinner in Little Rock, Ark., the general himself raised money for and lauded the Bush administration in May 2001 before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. [This is a bald-faced lie debunked earlier on these pages: Clark praised the foreign policy of Poppy Bush in expanding NATO and managing the dissolution of the Soviet Union NOT Junior’s ham-handed imitation of Kaiser Wilhelm.] And as recently as January, he gave the impression to two Republicans at a meeting in Switzerland that he would have joined their party had he not felt snubbed by the Bush White House after the attacks.
Both Republicans and Democrats who have talked with General Clark said they perceived him essentially as a centrist who felt forced by the political process to declare himself a member of the Democratic Party because he wanted to run for president — and that was the only party that did not have a nominee.
His opponents call it opportunism. [And I call it a recognition of basic facts: The Democratic party is the home of centrists today—that is why you have people who in earlier years were Republicans leaving the party to become Democrats, like Jeffords.]
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut has said that the general's joining the Democratic Party was a matter of "political convenience, not conviction."[We’ve got a word for Lieberman…no, not loser, well, not only loser. DINO – as proved in his “debate with Cheney. He’s the GOP’s favorite “Democrat” for a lot of good reasons.] But General Clark said that when he was in uniform, he could not have declared a party affiliation because he needed to serve the commander in chief, whatever the party.
When he announced his allegiance to the Democrats, he implied that he had a natural affinity with them.
"I like the message the party has, I like what it stands for," he said. "To start, it's a party that stands for internationalism, it's a party that stands for ordinary men and women, it's a party that stands for fair play and equity and justice and common sense and reasonable dialogue."
General Clark's father, who died when Wesley was 3, was steeped in Democratic ward politics in Chicago and ran for alderman in 1927. General Clark said in a recent interview that his mother told him that Richard J. Daley, who rose to become the legendary mayor of Chicago, once worked in his father's office.
Yet, more than two weeks after General Clark announced he was running for president as a Democrat, he still has not changed his party registration. [My goodness, see, he isn’t really a Democrat after all, Vere are his papiers!] He remains registered as an independent in Pulaski County, Ark. Campaign aides said he has been too busy to tend to the paperwork but will do so pronto.
Still, the body of evidence before his Sept. 3 declaration suggests that he might just as easily have announced that he was a Republican. [Well, except for the fact that it doesn’t suggest that, only Kit and her GOP compadres suggest that, making it a cozy conspiracy of three.]
Two prominent Republicans, Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado and Marc Holtzman, president of the University of Denver, recalled in interviews this week an unusual encounter with General Clark at the economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, in January. They struck up a conversation with General Clark, who was sitting nearby but whom neither of them had met. They said that he started talking about his relationship with the Bush administration and quoted him as saying: "I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls."
General Clark, asked in a telephone interview about the conversation, did not deny it but said of his remark, "That was a joke!" [pregnant pause while Kit attempts to imply that somehow Clark is misrepresenting the event, his participation in it, and is now “reinventing” himself to serve his own ambition ta da! Just like Gore!]
Neither Mr. Owens nor Mr. Holtzman saw it that way. "He said it very directly, he didn't say it as a joke," Mr. Owens said. "And he repeated it. He wasn't joking."
Mr. Holtzman recalled: "This wasn't a joke. The governor said to him, `With all due respect, there are many reasons to become a Democrat or a Republican, but not having your phone call returned is not one of them.' And we also said to him that someone of his stature, with his relationships, ought to have other ways of communicating his interest if he thought he was being ignored. He just shrugged his shoulders." [after all, what motivation would GOP politicians have to misrepresent the truth about the gravest threat to Dubya?]
It is not clear that General Clark ever called Mr. Rove, who is President Bush's senior political adviser. [Actually it is quite clear, as we will see – he didn’t. Why not? Because, as Clark himself explained, the comment was a joke, a throw-away line used to tweak some GOoPers who were disappointed that the general was going to evict the illegal squatter] After the incident was first reported in Newsweek, The Daily Standard, the online version of the conservative Weekly Standard, asked Mr. Rove to check his telephone logs at the White House. The Daily Standard reported that there had been no calls from General Clark. [Gee, those logs showed up awful quick, wonder why that hasn’t been the case in the Plame affair. But more to the point, Clark never called Rove. Why? Because it was a joke, he was tweaking the GOoPers. But you’d never know this from Kit’s breathless retelling. You’d think she’s breaking the Watergate affair…]
One possibility is that rather than actually call Mr. Rove, General Clark had simply expected to be called upon for his military expertise in helping to shape the war against Iraq. [Earth to Kit… Earth to Kit…] As Mr. Holtzman said, "He was very positive with where the president was going with Iraq," although he is an archcritic now. [Well, it’s so good that we have such a sterling GOP reference to tell what was really happening…NOT. And can you believe it, she spent SEVEN paragraphs on a canard that has already been disproven… indeed she even provides the evidence to disprove it, if she’d only take the general at his word… but NOOO, Karl Rove wants it repeated ad nauseum until people can’t get it out of their head, like a show tune.]
Whether General Clark's Republican-tinged past will matter to Democratic voters is unclear. Some of those at the Democratic meeting on Friday said they were open to him…
Republican-tinged –good lord – hide the children and send the women folk outta da house! If only he were just a serial groper like Arnie, that we could live with…
My father, heaven forgive him, voted for Reagan twice, and he is as staunch a Democrat as you can find today. Why? Because that was TWO DECADES AGO. If this were about a member of the GOP, say Henry Hyde having a sexual affair at the age of forty, it would be dismissed as a "youthful" indiscretion. But I guess Clark's votes of 20-30 years ago are more relevant than, say, Arnie constantly and consistently fingering women's privates without consent for the past thirty years.
And in any case, what Democrat hasn't flirted with options, rather than belonging to the same-thinking-borg known as the GOP. As a famous Democrat once said: I don’t belong to an organized party, I’m a Democrat.
And so is Wes Clark.
And hopefully, so will many other folks who once voted for the GOP or the Greens or whoever else. That’s the name of the game, Kit, in case you didn’t know: getting more votes by appealing to more voters. And yes, Dems are allowed to win elections too.
So -- get over it, Kit.
And please, NY Times, reassign her--for her own sake--as well as ours.
7:32:19 PM 
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