When future generations look back on this moment, they will shake their heads in disbelief at the fact that the first African-American nominee faced such blatant bias and hostility from a corrupt media establishment. While Americans should be focusing on this great progressive achievement and the Democrats' vision for the future, the media has used a small group of internet conspiracy theorists to distract the country with a petty red herring. Their goal is simple: to deny Barack Obama the traditional privilege of a convention where he and his supporters can speak directly to the American people. Instead, the pundits and producers have drowned out the actual story in Denver to carry water for John McCain and demoralize Democrats.

Well, if you're in Denver, you can fight back. The media is desperate for controversy, and there is no reason we should not be using this against them. Follow me below the fold to find out how you can help.

McCain's campaign has never been given to consistency. When they're not saying that Obama's is the most liberal member of the Senate (more liberal than socialist Bernie Sanders!), they're pointing out how he voted with Bush 50% of the time. When they're not portraying him as an effete celebrity who could never stand up to dictators, they're insisting that he's a cutthroat politician who spent his Saturdays dumping corpses into the Chicago River with Rezko and the Weathermen. And when he's not arrogantly acting as if he were the president, he's callously frolicking on the beach when he should be deploying personal diplomatic teams to Georgia.

Every four years, when the Democrats have finally settled on a nominee, we reach a point where it becomes clear that the Republicans have us totally beat when it comes to party discipline. Whereas Republicans hit the airwaves to deliver the party line, the Democrats are plagued by a swarm of self-promoters who like nothing more than the free publicity of offering 'advice' to the nominee via journalists who are eager to scribble up concern troll articles that are validated by that dreaded phrase, "Fellow Democrats say..."

As usual, we now have Begala and Carville jumping out and disseminating their poison, but it reached a fever pitch this Sunday when the New York Times raised armchair campaign managing to an art form by compiling completely banal "advice" from a number of prominent elected Democrats.

Well, here's some advice to the party hacks who just can't stop complaining: if you're worried about the campaign, get off your lazy ass and spew some f'n talking points, jackass.

Among the candidates who have been named on various short lists, Sam Nunn is probably the most vilified and despised among the netroots, even moreso than Hagel. There is good reason for this. The 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' was one of the most shameful episodes of the Clinton era, and Nunn's participation earned him a lifetime of scorn. Yet, for this very reason, the possibility of Nunn has been almost completely dismissed. Instead, we get dozens of unrealistically hopeful diaries about Wes Clark, as well as the usual conventional wisdom regarding Bayh and Kaine. The fact of the matter, however, is that the dominant perceptions here are not the same as those held over at Obama HQ. As Obama's reversal on FISA demonstrated, he is not the least bit apprehensive about pissing off the netroots, and with McCain's visible embrace of the Rovian far right, anti-McCain sentiment has become nearly as powerful a motivating force as pro-Obama sentiment (as demonstrated by the Democrats' superb fundraising numbers), giving Obama even less incentive to cater to his base. For this reason, I suspect Nunn is probably more likely than most think, and that sometime this week, we may see a sudden spike in the number of broken cell phones. The question, then, is this: can progressives learn to stop worrying and love the Nunn?

On this day exactly four years ago, the first Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad began airing in Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Of course, where the group actually bought airtime was irrelevant, as the ad set off a media frenzy all too similar to the one we saw last week. With a series of scurrilous ads that made outlandish and easily refuted accusations, the group was able to secure millions of dollars worth of free airplay with the aid of a complicit media. During the daytime coverage, the ad was played repeatedly without any serious effort to investigate or fact check the allegations, and during the evenings, pundits like Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough turned cable news into an unapologetic platform for the group's propagandists.

For anyone who has been paying attention to the 'Political Ticker' on CNN's web site, an anti-Obama bias has been evident for quite some time. It's been unclear just why CNN's web team has desperately tried to justify McCain's juvenile attacks and fixated on every one of Obama's trivial gaffes (while ignoring McCain's), but the latest fiasco may give us a clue. Deciding to cover a largely irrelevant story about Obama's opposition to slavery reparations and a Congressional apology, CNN put up this completely ridiculous headline:

Perhaps the greatest challenge that Obama and the progressive community faces is the destruction of the media's carefully crafted and jealously guarded myth of 'the Maverick' John McCain. As billmon's fantastic diary pointed out, McCain has always been an unremarkable politician who willfully embraces politically expediency to the delight of a media that loves to praise hollow and often underhanded gestures of bipartisanship. Describing his self-serving posture in the Keating Five Scandal, billmon notes:

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn’t hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

Basically, McCain's artificial persona has given him cover to indulge the worst tendencies of career politicians while simultaneously being held to a totally inverted set of standards.

With assistance from Hannity-mouthpiece George Stephanopolous, John McCain used ABC's This Week to attempt to inject the largely irrelevant topic of affirmative action into the campaign. After Stephanopolous gleefully allowed McCain to recite his false charges about the Landstuhl clusterfuck without challenge or the faintest hint of journalistic integrity, another softball was served up to allow McCain to bring up just how angry he is about those damned women and blacks taking all the good opportunities. Of course, this is yet another flip-flop of monumental proportions, not that any of the sycophantic bootlickers in the McCain-worshiping press care.

Obama's speech in Berlin was pretty good. While it didn't offer much new for those of us who have been following Obama abroad, it did give Europe an opportunity to see that we are not solely defined by the Bush years, and certainly, it lends credibility to Obama's argument that he has the 'soft power' to restore our reputation overseas. Yet, I think Obama missed a majority opportunity. While it was a good speech, it was not memorable, and I don't think anyone will be talking about it years or even just months down the line. By giving a safe speech, Obama did not really put his considerable influence to use, and he didn't really connect why it's so significant that 200,000+ Germans turned out to see an African-American candidate for president. While this was probably the easiest thing to do, I think Obama should have taken a risk. He should have embraced what he represents for the world and asked Europe to acknowledge its own failure to offer equal opportunities for minorities and immigrants.

Apparently upset that the media has reluctantly acknowledged that Obama's foreign policy trip has been a resounding success beyond anyone's expectations, McCain has now started throwing a petulant hissy fit that his lies about Obama's position on Iraq and al-Maliki's statements are not getting perpetuated uncritically by every journalist in the business. Hoping to replicate a successful play made by Senator Clinton, he has now initiated a campaign to bully any non-compliant members of the press into his service. Apparently, anything less than complete, pathological hostility to Barack Obama is unacceptable. Of course, McCain is acting less like the oppressed outcast than the paranoid, jealous lover. It's not that the media has been particularly negative towards him. Rather, he simply cannot handle the faintest indication that they might be anything less than completely devoted to his campaign.

They haven't endorsed officially, but they're pretty damn close. After meeting with Iraqi officials, the spokesman for the Iraqi government reiterated Maliki's comments in support of Obama's withdrawal time table. In this video, Ali al-Dabbagh clearly states (in English):

We are talking about a real time table which Iraqis set.

When asked by a reporter what this meant, al-Dabbagh responded:

Up to 2010.

If you're wondering why the Maliki "correction" issued by CentCom doesn't sound like a "correction" and doesn't specify what needs to be "corrected," you're missing the point.Bush and McCain aren't trying to get Maliki to retract the  his statement in terms of the policy he endorsed, they just want to salvage a meme they have been carefully cultivating since the beginning of the month: namely, that Obama has supported some mythical position called "precipitous withdrawal" and that the reiteration of his old position over the July 4th weekend constituted a "flip-flop." Now, with the insanity surrounding Maliki's statements, we can clearly see that this campaign wasn't just an effort to make Obama look indecisive and inconsistent. The campaign, facilitated by a shamefully compliant media (and even some progressive bloggers), was intended to give McCain cover to steal Obama's policy.

As if Bush disingenuously calling for a "time horizon" for withdrawal wasn't enough for the GOP's daily series of flip-flops and contradictions, now John McCain thinks we will see "spectacular terrorist attempts made in the wake of what he has referred to as the "success of the Surge." Given that McCain has asserted that Al Qaeda has been defeated, sectarian violence has ended, and political reconciliation has been achieved, it's unclear how he thinks terrorists in Iraq could also have the capacity for multiple "spectacular" attacks, though I'm guessing it has something to do with his equally contradictory insistence that sixteen months is too soon to bring American soldiers home.

When Obama made his long-expected decision to opt out of public financing, the media went berserk in a fit of phony outrage acting like Obama's small donor advantage was somehow unfair to McCain's legion of fat cat backers. Even at DailyKos, some misguidedly expressed disapproval at what they saw as Obama's inappropriate attempt to portray his decision as "declaring independence from a broken system." While the ethical reasoning Obama's decision has already been vindicated by the swarm of 527s that have been cropping up to oppose him, one of which was openly working together with McCain confidants Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.

But 527's are only part of the problem. Over at JedReport, Jed has explained why Obama's alleged "flip-flop" was a matter of political survival, as John McCain's campaign is funneling millions into an independent expenditure committee while planning to rip off $84,100,000 from American taxpayers.

I guess the fundraisers are over.

Via the King of Hacks:

Following up on today's NYTime's Op-Ed, Barack Obama will be giving what his campaign calls a "major speech" on Iraq tomorrow. This appears to be part of a big post-post-primary/pre-convention push back against the DC punditry's aggressive and flatly misleading campaign to paint him as a flip-flopper (and Democrats as advocates of some mythical position called "precipitous withdrawal").

Whenever controversy emerges in the netroots, one of the most commonly used rhetorical bludgeons I see tossed around is some variation of the "[X] is not progressive" line. Since "progressive" has become the preferred means of self-identification for the left, there seems to be some confusion as to what it actually means. As usage of the term became more common, it has been co-opted by several distinct ideologies (often earnestly) who seek to position themselves as the essence of progressivism. Yet, a progressive is not an ideological liberal, socialist, libertarian, communitarian, or anything like that. In fact, it's not really an ideology at all. That being so, the notion that there are clear litmus tests as to what makes someone a progressive is a totally misguided proposition. While progressivism doesn't exclude adherents of a particular ideology, it is not defined by any of them. While it does entail a certain worldview, it cannot be equated with a simple list of policies or bills nor can it be equated with any one individual. Jim Webb is a progressive. Barbara Boxer is a progressive. Brian Schweitzer is a progressive. So is Howard Dean. And John Edwards. And Kathleen Sebelius. And Patrick Leahy. And Hillary Clinton. And yes, most certainly, Barack Obama.

Hoping to avoid controversy (oops), Barack Obama decided to go along with the majority in supporting what is indisputably a terrible bill. In the process, Obama has provided a good example of the error of personality-driven politics. For those who thought Obama would never maneuver or retreat from a tough stand, yesterday's vote demonstrated that every politician will inevitably let us down. In all likelihood, the netroots will never have a nominee who stands with them on every important fight, and that being the case, the netroots shouldn't be expected to act as just another arm of someone's political machine. From here on out, the netroots should refuse to donate to any Democratic nominee, including Barack Obama.

Instead, there are dozens of other important Democratic campaigns that deserve our money. Below the fold, I've provided links to a few of these. So if you've been withholding that check for Obama, rip it up and write a new one. Barack Obama doesn't deserve your money. These campaigns do.

As if having McCain's donut server use the AP as a public platform for hissy fits wasn't bad enough, everyone's favorite AP hack has now returned with a massive red herring tossed out as a sneering reaction to criticism of McCain's ludicrous balance-the-budget-by-winning-the-war plan.