Death Has Shot Dick Cheney In The Face, Plus
CBS kisses the . . . ring, plus music
The guy perhaps most responsible for bequeathing Trump an executive branch swollen with monstrous powers, along with the instruction manual for claiming more, and who not incidentally helped steal the 2000 election with the help of a complaisant Supreme Court, and who later bitched loudly about Trump abusing the powers of the presidency and trying to steal an election, is dead.
Dick Cheney championed torture and stood out as the worst human in an administration filled to overflowing with horrible ones. War criminal, war profiteer, bully—the eternal Nixon hype man never met an illegal surveillance program he didn’t like or a congressional power he didn’t lust after for the executive branch.
Directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and what ranks among the largest mass displacements of civilians from their homes; architect of a war that fragmented and then blew up an entire region in only a few short years; directly responsible for sucking more than a trillion dollars from the U.S. economy and setting it alight in that war; indirectly responsible for at least tens of thousands more deaths and hundreds of thousands if not millions more refugees.
One could run out of pixels tallying this asshole’s crimes and misdemeanors. I’ll just mention one more: Cheney was responsible for “Operation Just Because,” Bush père’s illegal invasion of Panama where the US killed some 3,000 civilians—just because.
Thanks to unlimited access to the kind of health care most Americans could only dream of and that Cheney didn’t want them to have, he survive multiple heart attacks and surgeries and various chronic diseases to die at 84.
In a remarkable moment [in 2022], Democrats lined up to greet the former Republican vice president and shake his hand. Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugged Cheney. The former vice president slammed Republican leaders in Congress, saying they do not resemble the leaders he remembered from his time in the body.
Of course they did. Of course she did. Of course he did.
CBS kisses the . . . ring
First CBS News gave Trump $16 million; then they gave him their offending flagship news show, 60 Minutes. Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump for the show on Sunday and put up virtually no resistance either by way of posing challenging questions or challenging his inevitably fictitious or non-responsive answers to even her softball questions.
The show’s editors cut some of the worst stuff from the version of the interview which aired, but it’s all there in the transcript. Here’s what long-time press critic Dan Froomkin had to say about the interview in his Press Watch newsletter.
When you sit down with someone who constantly says things that aren’t remotely true, you have a choice to make: Do you confront them? Or do you enable them?
Sadly, in her interview with Donald Trump broadcast on Sunday, CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell – like so many journalists before her – chose to do the latter.
It was hardly unexpected. Given CBS’s abject surrender to Trump in a bogus lawsuit last summer, and its new Trump-friendly leadership, the man had no reason to fear confrontation.
But confrontation is the only way any journalist will ever start chipping away at the key, underlying questions about Trump that the public deserves answers to. Among them:
Is he delusional, or is he a liar, or is he both?
Is he being fed false information from his staff, or is he just making stuff up himself?
Is he mentally competent?
Does he know basic facts?
Does he understand the terms he uses?
Does he have any actual policy views, or is it all just about accruing personal power?
How profound is his racism?
Obviously 60 Minutes is not the only culprit with respect to dodging those questions, and Trump doesn’t give interviews to people he thinks might press him. The problem is he went into the O’Donnell interview with the expectation she wouldn’t hound him, and he was right. She rolled over.
Margaret Sullivan, who was excellent as a public editor at the New York Times (which desperately needs one still) and as a media critic at The Washington Post (which likewise desperately needs a public editor), had this to say about the interview.
During his interview with Norah O’Donnell for that show this past Sunday night, Trump decided to play media critic. This part of his interview didn’t make the cut of what was shown on the broadcast, but it certainly is telling about the rightward leanings of new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — and even more telling about the direction of the corporate ownership.
“And actually ‘60 Minutes’ paid me a lot of money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not — you have a great — I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great — from what I know.
Also this highly inaccurate depiction of the supposed basis of his lawsuit: “But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me a lot of money because they took (Kamala Harris’s) answer out that was so bad it was election-changing, two nights before the election. And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news.”
And this: “I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership — CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
Emphasis is Sullivan’s. O’Donnell pushed back against exactly none of that, including that the news show she works for fabricated a Kamala Harris quote and inserted it in place of the real one—in other words, that they committed one of the cardinal sins of journalism, deliberately making stuff up.
Sullivan also notes that in tandem with the network bestowing generational wealth on a right-wing polemicist with no newsroom experience to run their operation, CBS News agreed to hire a “bias monitor” to satisfy a regime requirement for approval of the merger that handed the network to far-right billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby son, David Ellison. Here’s how Media Matters reported that appointment.
Like Bari Weiss, the new news chief, Kenneth Weinstein has no newsroom experience but impeccable right-wing bona fides.
The new owners of CBS News announced Monday that they have selected Kenneth R. Weinstein — a Donald Trump supporter and right-wing think-tanker with no apparent newsroom experience who often criticizes the news media’s purported liberal bias — to scrutinize the network’s coverage as its ombudsman.
The position will allow Weinstein to serve as a conduit for the MAGA movement’s complaints about CBS News’ coverage and personnel, allowing Trumpist operatives and right-wing media to discipline the network’s journalists.
David Ellison’s Skydance Media promised to appoint a CBS News ombudsman as part of the shakedown Trump and his administration put it through in order to secure its acquisition of CBS parent company Paramount. When Brendan Carr, the Trumpist head of the Federal Communications Commission, finally blessed the Skydance deal in July, he touted its pledge to “root out the bias” at CBS News.
Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer wrote in September of 2024 about the long-term right-wing plot to control the national media that was spawned by the Powell Memo, authored by the then soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell in 1971 and echoed in the pages of Project 2025.
Part of the strength of the excellent new documentary podcast series Master Plan (created by the journalist David Sirota and his team at The Lever) is that it thoroughly debunks the bland image of Powell as a moderate and instead shows that he was one of the founding fathers of modern American plutocracy.
Powell earns particular pride of place in the show because of his authorship of a notorious 1971 memo (prepared for the US Chamber of Commerce) that laid out a strategy for a corporate counterrevolution against the emerging social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s (notably the Black Power movement, environmentalism, and consumer protection). The memo was a call to arms for corporate America to use its economic power to push back against the left, with particular emphasis on the importance of gaining sway over the courts, the academy, and the media.
The Powell Memo was the Project 2025 of the Nixon era—a detailed program for establishing and entrenching right-wing power over the commanding heights of American government and society.
As a corporate attorney, Powell was behind some of the most virulent science-denying campaigns launched by the tobacco industry, and an advocate of both using corporate advertising money to pressure news organizations and of undermining campaign finance limits on corporate contributions (bribes) to politicians.
Powell was no doubt gratified to have lived long enough to see Powell acolyte Roger Ailes establish Fox News with the blessing and backing of Rupert Murdoch, and he would be ecstatic with the downfall of CBS News—although one must note, as The Lever’s “Master Plan” prominently does, that the already-legendary CBS reporter and anchor Walter Cronkite hosted a party celebrating the corporate gunslinger’s elevation to the bench in 1972, so he might not be altogether surprised.
The total capture of CBS News represents yet another trophy claimed in the long march toward right-wing, corporate media hegemony. And as we all know, success breeds success.
Music
Just a short list today, concluding with a trio of endearing lads called The Chats.
Lambrini Girls, “Help Me I’m Gay”
Pip Blom, “Get Back”
The Bug Club, “A Bit Like James Bond”
Fishbone, “Ma and Pa”
L.A. Witch, “777” and more
The Chats, “Pub Feed”
That, Comrades in Tunefulness, is all I got. If you like it please share it, and if you’ve not already done so, please consider a free or paid subscription—the main advantage of the latter being that you’ll help keep me in the caviar that the SNAP interruption has cruelly yanked from my Sunday brunch menu.
People think this rot is recent, but it’s been germinating for some time, and it precedes Nixon, though he made the first acceleration from within the scope of the executive. It’s within McCarthyism that we see these histrionics and paranoia writ large by way of mass media - though again, there are antecedents to that (the Yellow Peril, which got written into law as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and such). But the gravest error that amplified this was the gradual devolution of what had been congressional powers, such as the War Powers Act, which led to the temptations of more power-grabbing and the enabling of this kind of corruption that, over time, has snowballed.
I hurt my knee this morning, pretending I was dancing on Dick Cheney's grave. I believe I've commented before that I think that Nixon is the root cause of much of what's wrong with this country today, with people like Lee Atwater and his ilk shouldering much of the blame, but if a person made the argument that maybe Cheney is the worst of all of them, it'd be difficult to mount a particularly strong counterargument.