Ideologue Revealed!

Someone or something has forced Reinhard into a reluctant, grudging admission of reality.

Read his latest article here

Thursday’s article, a full eleven days since his latest spew on the Oregonian’s editorial pages, discards the traditional Reinhardian tactics of ignoring reality in favor of talking points. The time off has apparently given him perspective on more than his RNC fax machine.

“This has never happened here before, and it has taken some getting used to on the part of your scribe. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has actually done something that makes sense, while President Bush has taken a position that's disappointing in the extreme. There, I said it.”

There, I said it? What is so difficult about agreeing with one person and disagreeing with another? Did he once swear an oath to continually disagree with any and all Democrats, no matter what they said? Did his oath include forever agreeing with every offhand utterance from Bush's mouth?

Probably.

This reminder permeates the article--Reinhard agrees with Pelosi's deduction of $70 million from her district's projects in the transportation bill to help pay for Katrina, and he disagrees that Bush doesn't want to raise taxes. But don't forget, he doesn't like doing it. As much as logic and fact may force Reinhard into taking a certain position, his basic Republican ideology still makes him dislike dealing with facts and reality.

He doesn't mind facts that suit his purposes, though. He brings up the $4 million in the bloated Transportation Bill for the Portland Streetcar, and goes on to say, "Surely, those who say they're worried about the Gulf Coast cleanup's impact on the deficit can bring themselves to delay such projects until the next transportation bill." Who needs a streetcar anyway, right, Reinhard? Way to bat for your home team.

According to the Citizens for Government Waste, Orgeon ranked 49th in pork out of the 50 states and DC. (a link) But Reinhard thinks we should probably give up our streetcar line, because Hawaii, with half a billion dollars in projects in the bill, needs more money for transportation than we do. Hawaii takes in 30 times as much per capita as Oregon...but Reinhard advocates taking our streetcar down? What gives?

Is Reinhard just bringing up the anti-pork argument as a way to cut our funding for "The City That Works?" Public transportation is nearly communism, I guess.

But why is Reinhard, a selfish Republican, advocating that Oregon give up its already paltry transportation winnings? It must be to form the base of his argument, that giving up pork is good. That's fine as an argument, but do a little investigative legwork, and find out who is actually abusing the bill. Excoriating your own state for getting funding for transportation projects in the transportation bill is not the corruption that people are decrying in the transportation bill; it does have legitimate uses, like expanding light rail to conserve energy. Reinhard is incapable of even finding decent points to make his arguments with.

Back to his grudging admission of reality: at the end of the article, Reinhard comes to the conclusion of a "temporary" tax increase. Did you hear that, everybody? He doesn't want to raise taxes! He's not a commie! It's only temporary!

He stated first at the outset of the article, "I yield to no one in my zest for tax cuts." Okay, to what extent?

How long should we cut taxes? If Reinhard's zest were allowed to run unchecked (as simlar zests have done in the last five years), how much is too much in tax cuts?

Reinhard does not advocate a sound tax policy. He advocates a perpetual cutting of taxes, regardless of how the government works with or without taxes. He reveals himself as an ideologue, and not someone who wishes to see govenment function properly.

Do we really want an ideologue spewing partisan slogans on editorial pages? Why can't we have people with solutions, instead of agendas, disseminating their ideas?

Dare We Hope?

Reinhard has not published an editorial for an entire week. Could it be? Has he decided to take some time off, and take some Writing 121 classes at PCC?

We can only hope. In the meantime, I decided to parse a bit of the O's larger coverage.

Do you find the anti-anti war protestors more interesting? Because I don't.

In Sunday's paper, buried on page A10, was a short article by Jennifer C. Kerr of the Associated Press. Rather, it was a snippet of an article. It gave a very brief, tantalizing bite of an event that drew 100,000 people to Washington, DC. The article quoted Police Chief Charles Ramsey, and two signs.

Then on page A2 of Monday's paper was a larger article about the anti-anti-war protestors, by Elisabeth Goodridge of the AP. The article quoted 2 signs, and 4 different people, including quotes from speeches given at the rally--which consisted of less than 400 people.
None of the speeches from the first anti-war protest were quoted. None of their reasons for attending the protest (which was 250 times the size of the anti-anti-war protest)were elucidated or quoted.

Was this stunning lack of coverage because the Oregonian assumes that we all know why a hundred thousand people are protesting the war? Did the Oregonian think that we were unaware of the reasons that a few people supported the war?

This skewed coverage of two very different protests shows unbridled bias. The Oregonian could have published Kerr's story in full from the AP wire, giving such a massive turnout the coverage it rightly deserved. But instead, the Oregonian chose to continue upholding the status quo, and to reinforce simple-minded opinions about the war.

Portland is an intellectually vibrant community. Yet our hometown newspaper offers us more coverage of what we already know instead of what we want to know more of. I had to go online to search for more protest coverage, and there was plenty. Why didn't the Oregonian publish a follow-up on Monday that did more than toe the Republican party line?

Because they are biased, plain and simple. I dare them to prove me wrong.

Isn't John Roberts Dreamy?

Conservative apologist David Reinhard, in his 9/18 article in Sunday's Oregonian, does everything but wax poetic on the light beaming from John Roberts' eyes. Reinhard does not take a real look at Roberts, or at the confirmation hearings. He parrots a few dittoes heard often on Fox News, throws in a few quotes, and voila! An article.

This latest spoof on editorials is a further example of Reinhard's incompetence. Did he watch the confirmation hearings? Did he listen to them on that moderate station that is way too loony left for him, NPR? No. If he had, he would surely have commented on Roberts' artful use of the verbal parry (which was impressive) and his coolness under fire (which was well-controlled). Reading Reinhard's column is like reading a summary of the right-wing media's opinion of Roberts, and not an original point of view.

Why doesn't the Oregonian just run a weekly list of Fox News headlines, and save on the salary? Better yet, they can just print the latest RNC talking points verbatim. It would save Reinhard the trouble of trying to form coherent sentences.

Which he noticeably fails to do in his first paragraph, by the way. "John Roberts spent four days before the Senate Judiciary Comittee, and the nation saw that judges who favor the judicial philosophy set forth by President Bush are not a threat to all America holds dear."

I had to read this sentence three times to understand who the subject was. Was it the philosophy of Bush? Was it Bush himself? Oh, it was the judges who favor a certain ideology set forth by a certain man acting on the verb "are not a threat." Got it. Great new streamlining on your new Sunday rollout, Oregonian.

Reinhard then throws in big sounding words--"his only high crime and misdemeanor was unleashing a flood of senatorial baseball metaphors." Why is he using the language of impeachment? "His only gaffe" and "his only mistake" would have served; why is Reinhard going out of his way to show that he actually knows something like legalese?

Probably because he is insecure about his political knowledge. I would be too, if I was nothing but a dittohead.

The brunt of the article (once we get through all the sappy proselytization) points to Roberts' main qualification: he is not an activist judge! Republicans hate activist judges, but boy, is he ever not an activist judge! Got that, everybody? Both RNC talking points are still intact, and Republicans don't actually contradict themselves on a daily basis! Everybody got it?

Thanks, Reinhard. Your work as a propagandist serves Portland admirably. How about you express an original thought next time?

He had the opportunity at the end of the article to do so, when he quoted Roberts saying, "if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution."

He presents this as a cut and dry wrap up, that Roberts interprets the Constitution literally, no more, no less. But he leaves out a huge, gaping hole in this tidy package.

People interpret the same words differently ALL THE TIME.

Roberts is really saying that if he interprets the Constitution to say something one way, then that is how he will apply it. Reinhard could have made this distinction, and then gone into a discussion on how Roberts interpreted things in his past. This would have been a well-structured analyzation of the next Supreme Court Justice.

But Reinhard is not interested in doing any actual analyzation. His job is to push an agenda, period. His presence on the editorial page of Portland's hometown newspaper is an insult to all people of intelligence who read it.

Continuing the Blame Game

On Thursday, Reinhard continued ignoring the President's public acceptance of responsibility for the Katrina response. His "knee-jerk defense" (his own words) is further proof he does not watch the news, but only parrots the most recent RNC talking points. Apparently they hadn't been updated yet.

Read his latest crap here


Reinhard spends the article lambasting local officials. He starts by just being mean. "She had spent a week watching her hometown become a dead zone. Maybe she thought this was endearing," he says of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA. He calls her "a pit bull with lipstick."

RNC Rule #1-Demonize the enemy.

The latest exercise of retardation is the right-wing excoriation of buses left in the water, when they could have been evacuating people. Gee, that sounds like a great idea. And if FEMA had a competent director, he may have used federal authority to put together just such a program. The Mayor, dealing with evacuating his staff, his city bureaucracy, and his family, should have thought about it first, though, right, David? That silly mayor, trumpeting about how the administration didnt help, when he didnt even use his own buses.

Note: he was in the middle of a flood. The levees broke. He ordered an evacuation, but this is not his stock in trade. It is SUPPOSED to be FEMA's stock in trade.

Now, a mayor not thinking of this obvious solution for evacuation is excusable; it is like having a politician not know the difference between thoroughbred horses. But when an expert in evacuations does not think of it, that is the problem.

Reinhard goes own to detail a conversation on TV that Sen. Landrieu held, when she was asked about the buses. Shame on a Senator for expecting a disaster management agency to handle those things. Reinhard then states:

"She then went on to pinpoint the specific problem: "This administration did not believe in mass transit.""

So, she brought in a corollary point, that buses were underfunded and not a high priority, because there were few federal funding opportunities for mass transit. (All the money was going to rich men like Reinhard and Stickel.)

But notice what Reinhard does: he makes it seem as if Landrieu used this as the culmination of her argument, and was trying to prove that the reason that the buses were not used was directly linked to Bush's lack of funding for mass transit.

This is a patently absurd argument, which is precisely why Reinhard made it look this way. He wanted the reader to assume that this was the culmination of Landrieu's argument, when it was only a minor point. He says:

"Yes, if the Bush administration had only chipped in for light rail, subways, streetcars and buses, New Orleans officials would have been fine when Hurricane Katrina hit and on sunny days, to boot."

RNC Rule #2: Put words in the mouths of your enemy.

He continues:

"A bit later she intoned, "Now is not the time for finger-pointing" -- and then proceeded to point exclusively at the Bush administration for Katrina's devastation of Louisiana."

Meanwhile, Reinhard has done the exact same thing, writing an entire editorial attempting to connect one failed tactic of evacuation to the wholesale failure of the state and local governments, and saying "There were obvious federal foul-ups. Our homeland-security system and federal-system mechanisms seemed to fail." Seemed to?

FEMA is the culprit in this entire failure, and Reinhard is not interested in admitting this. He is only interested in shifting the blame (see his earlier article on why playing the blame game is inappropriate). Uninterested in the truth, Reinhard is only a shill for his party.

How long will the Oregonian continue employing this partisan hack?

Eat Crow, Reinhard

Bush announced today he "takes full responsibility" for the lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina.
Will we be getting any retraction for Reinhard's Sept. 8 editorial?

Reinhard's 9/11 Article

I was really surprised by the David Reinhard article in Sunday's Oregonian, for two reasons.

1-It was not a remembrance of the World Trade Center attacks, connected to glorious praise for the invasion of Iraq.

2-It uses logical arguments, instead of blind asserions, and puts them together to make a valid point.

Sunday's article

This is the first time in the years I have been reading Reinhard's crap that I have seen him construct a column using mostly valid premises, and a minimal amount of disconnected bullshit.
Not being a partisan hack myself, I am denied the opportunity to go on with my stated purpose (that I will deconstruct all of Reinhard's articles, because they all are complete crap) without making myself look a fool.

Many partisan hacks, Reinhard included, do not mind looking like fools. They will blindly cling to their position in defiance of logic, evidence, and fact. It must be easy, being a hack.

Because it is tough, let me tell you, to make a blog based on debunking bad columns--and then have a decent column come out. Almost as a slap in my face.

Did he have this one ghostwritten? Or is he simply able to exercise some actual writing talent, because he is writing on a local issue? Perhaps with national issues, he is required by his corporate RNC masters to regurgitate talking points almost verbatim. (The examples of this are plentiful.) But with this local issue, there is no fax from headquarters with fifteen points he has to try to fit in, and he actually wrote something worth reading.

His focus in this article was not so much the issue (that Oregon should adopt the tougher California clean-air emissions standards for automobiles, instead of the weak federal ones) but how the issue was currently being acheived. Gov. Kulongoski used a line-item veto to omit a passage forbidding Oregon taking those standards on.

In laymen's terms, the Legislature forbid the DEQ from spending any money to make cars stop polluting any more than they already are. The governor said, "No, you can't do that." That is the issue that Reinhard focuses on, and it was effective, because it prevented him from having to argue the actual issue--that cars should stop emitting so many toxic gases.

Instead the issue of the article seems to be the governor's "power grab," and he makes it seem that the Governor is trying to make legislation, and that is a power reserved for the legislature.

Lest we forget, an executive of a higher branch of government is also engaged in a power grab. George Bush, Reinhard's wet-dream hero, has taken upon himself the power to declare war on any country he pleases. This was a power once reserved exclusively for Congress; but Reinhard doesn't yap when a Republican makes a power grab. Or when a power grab results in the infinite detention, without charges, of American citizens on American soil--let's not focus on power grabs like those, or the executive branch contravening the legislative branch on issues like personal liberty and due process. It is so much more relevant to examine the relationship between branches of government through the lens of environmental standards, isn't it?

Reinhard's hypocrisy aside, his Sunday article was surprisingly good rhetoric. But, good rhetoricians aren't necessarily right; sometimes they are just really good at convincing people that a false position is true. Reinhard is generally not even good at this; so, what gives? Who wrote it for him? Or, why did he decide to actually put some effort into this local issue? Is he in the car business, or what?

Reinhard's Thursday, Sept. 8 article

Reinhard’s article in the Oregonian on Thursday, September 08 is a further reason why this apologist should not be allowed to write in any forum larger than his own notebook.

View this week's crap
here:

He contradicts himself throughout the piece, ignoring inconvenient facts and relying on talking points to hobble together something resembling an argument.

He is, in fact, emblematic of the current political debate.

The entire piece is centered around the “silliness” of the “blame-Bush” crowd. He steps right up to defend his incompetent hero, but near the end states that “Bush backers…shouldn’t offer up knee-jerk defense of the administration.”

So, let’s examine his knee-jerk defense of the administration. (Saying you shouldn’t do something doesn’t mean you won’t do it—only good people do that.)

“Blame-Bush cries largely ignore the fact that officials at other government levels play key roles in this disaster,” he says. Those other officials, however, were appointed by Bush. FEMA, which was organized to protect the nation from disasters such as this, went through a massive reorganization as it was absorbed into the Homeland Security Department. The loss of FEMA’s formerly competent abilities is due to Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security secretary—and a Bush appointee. The new head of the Homeland Security versioin of FEMA was also appointed by Bush—his qualifications for the job topped out at examining horseflesh. As a caretaker of Arabian stallions, Michael Brown was not fit for the job at FEMA. Bush appointed incompetent men to jobs they were not qualified for; this is his fault.

I heartily blame Bush for that, as well as the tens of thousands of lives that were lost and destroyed because he was on vacation while the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency.

Reinhard goes on to ask, “Why did the locals fail to implement their own emergency plans?” The locals were—to put it bluntly—underwater. Local officials may not have had their Rolodexes close to hand.

Many times, aid workers were hindered by the inefficient bureaucracy clogging the new FEMA. The web is rife with stories of people trying to help, but stopped by the government. Airboats in Florida were told to stay away from the area, because of liability. If an airboat crashed, the government might be sued.

A Red Cross plane full of food was not allowed to enter New Orleans airspace because Air Force One was in town, delivering Bush for a photo-op.

It goes on and on.

Federal officials said they could not even get into city limits, despite journalists broadcasting live from downtown. If locals did not implement their own emergency plans, as Reinhard complains, neither did the feds.

So some good-hearted people from around the country went in to rescue people stranded on rooftops. Some of them were celebrities. Reinhard derides them, saying “even anti-Bush celebs were back on the scene after Katrina.”

Sean Penn went around in a boat to rescue people who had no food or water. You’re right, Reinhard, he’s really sticking it to Bush there. These anti-Bush celebs, always hungry for a photo op.

Reinhard also says, “some critics are uninterested in a balanced exploration of the issues. They’re only blame gaming.”

Any balanced exploration will uncover these facts:

Bush cut money for the levees in New Orleans to be reinforced.

Bush’s appointees bungled this disaster spectacularly.

Bush was on vacation for days while people were dying in an American city

Now, there are many other factors involved, but it is apparent Bush is guilty of incompetence on some level. The three facts above will attest to this, even if you juxtapose them with dozens of pro-Bush arguments. But Reinhard refuses to admit any wrongdoing of Bush in his knee-jerk defense, and his plea for a “balanced exploration of the issues” will be fruitless so long as he is adamant that Bush can do no wrong.

His ideology supercedes his sense of logic, and he should be removed from the editorial board of the Oregonian. Any man who so wholeheartedly ignores hard facts in favor of personal ideology does not belong on the editorial pages of a major American newspaper—he belongs in obscurity.