Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?

Well, yeah, but when I think of today’s blunt, fact-based online hell-raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.

Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we associate with today’s best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day — and physically visit government archives and press offices, and personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That’s how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.

Izzy was the ultimate un-embedded reporter. His journalism was motivated by a simple maxim that resonates loudly in our era of Cheneys and Rumsfelds and WMD hoaxes: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone’s Weekly (biweekly through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone.

In real time in August 1964, Izzy was virtually alone in challenging the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, an imaginary “unprovoked attack” on U.S. warships used by the Johnson administration to send several hundred thousand American troops into Vietnam. How did Izzy do it? By citing international law texts and finding nuggets of truth in the Congressional Record of the Senate debate (no C-SPAN then) and in contradictory reporting in mainstream publications.

Izzy’s expose began boldly: “The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.” He fumed at the credulous MSM: “The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen.” Only two senators, Oregon’s Wayne Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening, had voted against the Tonkin Resolution; Izzy noted that the press had “dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the antiwar speeches of Morse and Gruening.”

Like today’s online journalistic entrepreneurs, being his own editor and boss allowed Izzy the freedom and space to parse out the distortions of government in detail. A year before the Tonkin hoax, he wrote: “In this age of corporation men, I am an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise.” While most journalists “find their niche in some huge newspaper of magazine combine, I am a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone.”

Bloggers battle today’s McCarthyites who smear Iraq War opponents as un-American abettors of our country’s enemies. Izzy battled the original Joe McCarthy, in issue after issue of his weekly. Indeed, he launched his publication the same month — January 1953 — McCarthy became chair of the Senate Operations Committee, enhancing his powers of intimidation. Izzy warned prophetically: “McCarthy is in a position to smear any government official who fails to do his bidding. With such daring and few scruples, McCarthy can make himself the most powerful single figure in Congress.”

Three months later, he wrote: “The most subversive force in America today is Joe McCarthy. No one is so effectively importing alien conceptions into American government. No one is doing so much to damage the country’s prestige abroad. . . .If ‘subversion’ is to be met by deportation, then it is time to deport McCarthy back to Wisconsin.”

Not until 11 months later did Edward R. Murrow air his first report on McCarthy.

Today, online media critics and bloggers expose the bigotry and fallacy gushing forth from Fox News and talk radio and the Rev. Moon-owned Washington Times, long-edited by Wes Pruden Jr. They blog about MSM being stenographers to rightwing extremists. When racists in Little Rock were obstructing court-ordered school desegregation in 1958, Izzy was on the scene reporting: “A staff correspondent in Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden the segregationist leader, as saying, ‘The South will not accept this outrage, which a Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on us.’ This was my introduction to a regional journalism which prints such statements matter-of-factly.”

The Communist-dominated regime referred to by Pruden Sr. was headed by Eisenhower.

Izzy loved to tell the story of how he found — hiding in plain view in different editions of the New York Times — one-paragraph “shirrtail” wire stories indicating that our country’s first underground nuclear test in Nevada in 1957 was detected in Toronto, Rome and Tokyo. Months later, just as hawks in Washington were preparing to attack a test ban treaty with the Soviets on the basis that nuclear tests could not be detected more than 200 miles away, Izzy found a seismologist in the Commerce Department who told him the test had also been detected as far away as Alaska and Arkansas. Izzy’s reporting obstructed the government’s lie before it could get its shoes on.

Starting out in his teens, Izzy was a daily reporter, editor and columnist. After moving to D.C. in 1940 to become Washington editor of The Nation, he exposed U.S. corporations still doing business with Hitler’s Germany. He was one of the first to sound the alarm about the Nazi holocaust, referring in 1942 to “a murder of a people.” An anti-racist, he battled the all-white National Press Club over exclusion of black journalists.

Izzy’s cantankerousness and “hound-dog tenacity” — in the words of his biographer — would make even the most stubborn blogger blush. Although he was a lifelong progressive, his journalistic hallmark was independence: “I felt that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism.” His writings show deep admiration for Franklin Roosevelt, yet his article on FDR’s death criticized his “deplorable disrespect for the constitutional amenities” in resisting a reactionary Supreme Court that knocked down one New Deal bill after another.

He wrote books passionately supporting the birth of Israel, but strongly criticized it for mistreatment of Palestinians. He advocated peace and negotiations with the Soviet Union, while increasingly vocal in denouncing its rulers: “The worker [in Russia] is more exploited than in Western welfare states.”

He despised racists, but fought for their free speech rights, and everyone’s: “Once you put ifs and buts in the Bill of Rights, nobody’s civil liberties will be secure.” That he marched to his own drummer can be seen in his dispatch from the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, in which he criticized “respectables” for muting “Negro militancy” into support of JFK’s inadequate program, and referred to Martin Luther King as “a little too saccharine for my taste.”

Born of immigrant parents, Izzy was an American patriot who worshipped the Bill of Rights: “You may think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I’m keeping Thomas Jefferson alive.”

And he worshipped our country’s tradition of press freedom: “There are few countries in which you can spit in the eye of the government and get away with it. It’s not possible in Moscow.” But Izzy was never naïve about American traditions that threatened freedom, and he had a 5,000-page FBI spy file to prove it.

Today’s muckraking bloggers are often belittled for working from their homes, far removed from the corridors of power. Izzy worked out of his home. If he were alive, he’d be applauding the Josh Marshalls and other independents, urging: Keep your distance from power.

I made no claim to inside stuff. . . I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. . . I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry. The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line. . . But a reporter covering the whole capitol on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures.

Imagine the obstacles Izzy faced — did I mention his impaired eyesight and hearing? — launching a weekly and finding an audience at the height of McCarthy’s witch hunts (even at $5 for an annual subscription).

Far fewer obstacles face today’s bloggers who seek to follow in Izzy’s footsteps — blessed as they are with relative freedom and this awesome research and outreach tool known as the Internet.

As these upstarts speak truth to power, I see Izzy Stone watching over them, from the heavens.

I’m not talking about the vitriol directed at him by former White House colleagues like Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer. I’m talking about McClellan’s other war collaborators: the movers and shakers in corporate media. The people McClellan refers to in his book as “deferential, complicit enablers” of Bush administration war propaganda.

One after another, news stars defended themselves with the tired old myth that no one doubted the Iraq WMD claims at the time. The yarn about hindsight being 20/20 was served up more times than a Rev. Wright clip on Fox News.

Katie Couric, whose coverage on CBS of the Iraq troop surge has been almost fawning, was one of the few stars to be candid about pre-invasion coverage, saying days ago, “I think it’s one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” She spoke of “pressure” from corporate management, not just Team Bush, to “really squash any dissent.” Then a co-host of NBC Today, she says network brass criticized her for challenging the administration.

NBC execs apparently didn’t complain when — two weeks into the invasion — Couric thanked a Navy commander for coming on the show, adding, “And I just want you to know, I think Navy SEALs rock!”

This is a glorious moment for the American public. We can finally see those who abandoned reporting for cheerleading and flag-waving and cheap ratings having to squirm over their role in sending other parents’ kids into Iraq. I say “other parents’ kids” because I never met any bigwig among those I worked with in TV news who had kids in the armed forces.

Given how TV networks danced to the White House tune sung by the Roves and Fleischers and McClellans in the first years of W’s reign, it’s fitting that it took the words of a longtime Bush insider to force their self-examination over Iraq. Top media figures had shunned years of well-documented criticism of their Iraq failure as religiously as they shunned war critics in 2003.

Speaking of religious, it wasn’t until two days ago that retired NBC warhorse Tom Brokaw was able to admit on-air that Bush’s push toward invasion was “more theology than anything else.” On day one of the war, it was anchor Brokaw who turned to an Admiral and declared, “One of the things that we don’t want to do is destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”

Asked this week about the charge that media transmitted war propaganda, Brokaw blamed the White House and its “unbelievable ability to control the flow of information at any time, but especially during the time that they’re preparing to go to war.” This is an old canard: The worst censors pre-war were not governments, but major outlets that chose to exclude and smear dissenting experts.

Wolf Blitzer, whose persona on CNN is that of a carnival barker, defended his network’s coverage: “I think we were pretty strong. But certainly, with hindsight, we could have done an even better job.” Coverage might have been better if CNN news chief Eason Jordan hadn’t gotten a Pentagon “thumbs-up” on the retired generals they featured. Or if Jordan hadn’t gone on the air to dismiss a dissenting WMD expert: “Scott Ritter’s chameleon-like behavior has really bewildered a lot of people. . . . U.S. officials no longer give Scott Ritter much credibility.”

ABC anchor Charlie Gibson, the closest thing to a Fox News anchor at a big three network, took offense at McClellan: “I think the media did a pretty good job.” With the “drumbeat” coming from the administration, “it was not our job to debate them,” said Gibson. He claimed “there was a lot of skepticism raised” about Colin Powell’s pre-war U.N. speech. Media critic Glenn Greenwald called Gibson’s claim “one of the falsest statements ever uttered on TV“ — and made his point using Gibson’s unskeptical Powell coverage at the time.

In February 2003, there was huge mainstream media skepticism about Powell’s U.N. speech . . . overseas. But U.S. TV networks banished antiwar perspectives in the crucial two weeks surrounding that error-filled speech. FAIR studied all on-camera sources on the nightly ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS newscasts: Less than 1 percent — 3 out of 393 sources — were antiwar. Only 6 percent were skeptical sources. This at a time when 60 percent of Americans in polls wanted more time for diplomacy and inspections.

I worked 10-hour days inside MSNBC’s newsroom during this period as senior producer of Phil Donahue’s primetime show (cancelled three weeks before the war while the network’s most-watched program). Trust me: too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense. I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side. I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show.

At MSNBC, I heard Scott Ritter smeared — on-air and off — as a paid mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein. After we had war skeptic and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the show, we learned he was on some sort of network blacklist.

When MSNBC terminated Donahue, it was expected that we’d be replaced by a nightly show hosted by Jesse Ventura. But that show never really launched. Ventura says it was because he, like Donahue, opposed the Iraq invasion; he was paid millions for not appearing. Another MSNBC star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then lost her job after criticizing the first weeks of “very sanitized” war coverage. With every muzzling, self-censorship tended to proliferate.

I’m no defender of Scott McClellan. Some may say he has blood on his hands — and that he hasn’t earned any kind of redemption.

But as someone who still burns with anger over what I witnessed inside TV news during that crucial historical moment, I’m trying my best to enjoy this falling out among thieves and liars.

Virtually every soul in that Detroit hotel banquet hall wept openly at the heartfelt, bone-chilling revelations pouring out of the Vietnam vets struggling with bloody memories and post-traumatic stress. But no one outside that hall could see or hear the proceedings. No TV or radio networks covered the event.

This weekend at the National Labor College near Washington D.C., a new generation of vets convened by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) presented powerful hearings – “Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan” – that were more extensive and perhaps even more emotional.

Thirty seven years later, I again found myself sobbing at testimony from solemn young Americans returned from needless war, grappling with shattered lives over brutalities against civilians and prisoners they’d witnessed or participated in.

But I was nowhere near D.C.

This time, I watched the dramatic testimony – often buttressed by photographic and video evidence — live online at www.IVAW.org. This time, I caught hours of coverage on Free Speech TV, the national satellite network that broadcast the panels of testimony and featured interviews with vets and their families in between panels. This time, I received regular video news feeds in my email inbox from The Real News Network. (The hearings were also televised on 20 public access channels from Fayetteville to Palo Alto, and in public gatherings from Florida to Alaska.)

On my car radio, I listened to the proceedings live on Pacifica network, which broadcast the hearings to affiliates nationwide – along with call-ins and email from listeners, including Iraq vets and soldiers not as critical of the war.

The four days of vets’ testimony revealed the struggle these young Americans are waging to regain their humanity and morality after having been transformed into callous war-fighters who largely dehumanized Iraqis as a people – not just “the enemy” or combatants. An objective observer hearing the testimony would have good reason to wonder if U.S. troops – given the often gratuitous and racist brutality, and the mistreatment of women, children and the elderly — can ever be a solution in Iraq.

On panel after panel, the veterans offered heartfelt “apologies to the Iraqi people” for what our country has done to their country. I saw a vet rip up the commendation he’d received from Gen. David Petraeus, denouncing the general as a cheerleader who put his own ambitions above his duty to the troops and to the truth. Many vets called for rapid withdrawal from Iraq and criticized Democratic leaders for prolonging and funding the endless occupation.

Ex-Marine Jon Turner, who served two tours in Iraq, ripped his medals from his shirt and threw them on the ground, concluding: “I’m sorry for the hate and destruction I and others have inflicted upon innocent people… Until people hear what is going on, this is going to continue. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”

Such powerful first-hand accounts – if heard by the American public – would threaten continued funding of the Iraq occupation. But national mainstream outlets in our country, unlike big foreign outlets, largely ignored this weekend’s proceedings.

Not surprisingly, these Iraq veterans had little but scorn for U.S. corporate media whose journalistic failures helped sell the war five years ago, and whose sanitized coverage helps sell the troop “surge” today.

But thanks to the Internet and the growing capacity of independent TV, radio and web outlets, a significant minority of Americans had access to these proceedings. And the archived hearings are now available to anyone anytime with computer access.

In Detroit in 1971, I remember what happened when one of the rare mainstream camera crews showed up at Winter Soldier. . .and then abruptly packed up to leave in the middle of particularly gripping testimony. A roomful of Vietnam vets booed and jeered. It was the moment I became a media critic.

Winter Soldier II shows that it’s not enough to criticize corporate media. Even more important is to take advantage of new technologies to keep building independent media.

I have a theory about a similarly subversive process that turns grown men once capable of independent and reasoned thought into robotic extremists. Call them Stepford Republicans. The nefarious transformation always occurs before the individual gets close to becoming a Republican president or vice president.

Stepford Wives become robotically subservient only to their husbands; they pose no threat to the rest of us. But Stepford Republicans become subservient to right-wing forces of corporatism, war and prejudice. Once converted into mindless ideologues, Stepford Republicans are a threat to us all.

The prototype of a Stepford Republican is PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN. After his apparent abduction and alteration, he became an instrument of corporate power in the White House: union-busting, downsizing, cutting school lunch funding. This is the Reagan many remember: champion of the overdog.

But when Reagan was still a sentient being, he was actually a bleeding-heart advocate for working people. He denounced budget cuts (“millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the federal school lunch program”) and tax cuts that “benefit the higher income brackets alone.” He assailed corporate profiteering, and labeled a top Republican “the banner carrier for Wall Street.” He hailed unions and complained that “labor has been handcuffed by the vicious Taft-Hartley law.”

In other words, before he was robotized, Ronald Reagan could be a warm, compassionate human being — and I offer a remarkable tape to prove my theory.

Many Americans have long suspected that VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY is an android. What they may not know is that — before being Stepfordized into a neoconservative drone — he was capable of non-ideological thought that would allow him to choose a peace option over war, able to use human reason to figure out why invading Iraq would inevitably lead to “quagmire.” This short video clip offers compelling evidence.

Today, MITT ROMNEY is such a robotically rabid spouter of social-conservative dogma that he’s won the praise of radio rightists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Offered as evidence of his Stepfordization is this video revealing a once human and tolerant Romney who seemed to care deeply about women’s rights and abortion rights, and resisted any connection to the policies of Reagan-Bush. It was this pre-abduction Romney who boasted that he would do more for gay equality than Ted Kennedy.

JOHN MCCAIN was also horrifically rewired toward servile courtship of the Religious Right. Dramatic evidence of McCain’s Stepfordization is caught on video: “Before” footage shows you a strong human speaking bravely against right-wing “agents of intolerance” like Jerry Falwell; “after” footage reveals a lifeless, docile tool of those same forces.

Perhaps you can’t accept my theory — despite the powerful taped evidence I offer — that these Republican icons are victims of Stepford-like abduction and transplant.

If so, I’d like to hear an alternative theory as to why these individuals betray their own principles or intellect — why they turn themselves into fawning servants of economic forces or ideologies or social movements they once abhorred.

The blind pursuit of power, you say? I’m simply unwilling to believe that human beings — even top Republicans — are so inherently opportunistic and corrupt.

I’ll stick with my abduction theory.

And as a longtime proponent of independent media, I’m gleeful that liberal/progressive bloggers have seized a new medium to mobilize millions of activists and confront a Democratic elite that seemed unwilling to confront and beat Team Bush.

Given my glee, it’s difficult for me to have to pose this question: Are the Netroots a paper tiger – more roar than bite?

Despite being overwhelmingly opposed to the nomination of Hillary Clinton, the Netroots have so far done little to slow down her coronation. Boosted by celebrity-worshipping corporate media (and a maximum donation from Rupert Murdoch himself), Hillary Clinton keeps rolling on – allied with the corporate lobbyists and Democratic insiders loathed even by moderately liberal bloggers.

Meanwhile, Clinton has never been popular among the Netroots. She’s never moved out of single digits in the (unscientific) monthly straw poll of DailyKos readers, while John Edwards has averaged 38 percent in the last six months among Kossacks, with Barack Obama averaging 26 percent.

In an April straw poll of MoveOn members following a virtual town hall on Iraq, the results were Obama (28%), Edwards (25%), Dennis Kunicich (17%) and Bill Richardson (12%) – followed by Clinton in fifth place with 11 percent. Clinton did better following a July town hall on climate change, but finished in third place, 17 points behind Edwards.

The reality is stark: While it’s hard to find a MoveOn leader or respected progressive blogger who supports Clinton, they can’t (or won’t) stop her.

Several factors may explain why most Netroots leaders are not taking stronger action:

1) They “misunderestimate” the potential hazards of another Clinton White House.

While progressives desperately want a Democratic president, the last Clinton in the White House subverted the progressive agenda. Eight years of Clintonite triangulation caused the Democratic Party to decline at every level of government]. Hillary today is surrounded by the same staff and would likely appoint the same corporate types to top jobs as Clinton I, where big decisions were often corrupt and calculated toward moneyed interests.

The toughest brawl Bill Clinton was willing to wage (besides saving his own hide from impeachment) was against the Democratic base: for the corporate-backed NAFTA. Through the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Bill brought us far more media conglomeration than George W. He pardoned well-connected fugitive financier Marc Rich, while leaving Native American activist Leonard Peltier to rot in prison despite pleas from Amnesty International and others.

Hillary’s contribution to Clinton I was her botched healthcare proposal, a corporate-originated “reform” that would have enshrined a half-dozen of the largest insurance companies at the center of the system, and was so convoluted it never came up for a vote.

What we’ve seen of Hillary Clinton in the Senate and on the campaign trail suggests that Clinton II would indeed be a sorry sequel. Today she’s winning the endorsement of Republican CEOs, after having had Murdoch host a benefit for her at the Fox News building in 2006. Just as Bill Clinton’s spine achieved a rare firmness while battling for NAFTA, we recently observed in Hillary a rare passion and firmness on a single issue: her YearlyKos defense of lobbyists, including those who “represent corporations that employ a lot of people.”

Like Bill campaigning as a populist and governing as a corporatist, Hillary’s stump speech proclaims she’ll end the Iraq war in January 2009, while she assures the New York Times of a long-term U.S. military presence inside Iraq. She’s tried to explain away her vote to authorize the war, but avoids mention of her even more dubious vote hours earlier against requiring United Nations approval (or, if U.N. approval failed, a second Congressional authorization) before war could begin. Her overall bellicosity on Iran and the Middle East wins praise from conservative pundits; her “Israel-right-or-wrong” stance could make Christian Zionists blush.

In too much of the liberal blogosphere, history begins with the Florida election theft of 2000, and events before that time seem ancient and irrelevant. There is insufficient grasp of how the Clintons’ rise to power was intertwined with the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Conference – set up 22 years ago to weaken the power of the grassroots (labor, feminist, civil rights) inside the party. Still on the attack in 2004, the DLC targeted new villains, like MoveOn and the Dean upsurge.

2) They want to be Democratic “team players.”

Matt Bai’s new book on the Democratic Party, The Argument, has a passing reference to Hillary Clinton’s courtship of MoveOn leaders in private meetings: “Her charm appeared to have paid off: while MoveOn’s members remained furious at Clinton for voting with Bush on the war resolution, its leaders refused to criticize her publicly.”

In truth, MoveOn leaders have gone beyond refusing to publicly criticize Hillary Clinton – actually finding bizarre excuses to praise her on some of her worst issues, like Iran and Iraq. During the 2006 Democratic Senate primary in New York, it was not a shock that MoveOn’s leadership would not help Clinton’s antiwar challenger, Jonathan Tasini, an under-funded long shot. But what purpose was served by not criticizing her when she brazenly refused to even debate Tasini on the war – or by lauding her for a McCain-like critique of Don Rumsfeld’s war “mismanagement”?

With MoveOn avoiding criticism of Clinton in ’05, ’06 and half of ‘07, then when?

Netroots leaders seem almost mute today as Hillary Clinton makes full use of old media/old money advantages. Bloggers who loudly championed the Dean insurgency are oddly quiescent as the candidate of the party establishment gains ground. Have these young insurgents become Democratic Party elder statespersons – team players first and foremost? Has the courtship by Party insiders quieted them?

What animated the meteoric growth of MoveOn and progressive blogs was a crucial insight: that the Democratic establishment was too spineless or clueless to stand up to the Bush agenda. This insight has never been more relevant than now – with Bush an unpopular lame duck and Democratic leaders in Congress offering “little other than one failure after the next since taking power in January,” in Glenn Greenwald’s words.

Ancient history, from 1993-1994, teaches us that loyalty to party should never come before loyalty to principles – and that which Democrats hold power can be as important as whether Democrats hold power. I was a young(er) columnist when Bill Clinton entered the White House and Democrats controlled Congress. We didn’t get promised campaign finance reform; we didn’t get promised investment in the cities; we didn’t even get a vote on healthcare – since the Clintons had undermined and triangulated the 100 Democrats in Congress co-sponsoring a bill for nonprofit National Health Insurance. But we did get NAFTA.

And soon – inevitably and predictably – we got the Gingrich counterrevolution.

3) There’s no Dean campaign to unite them – just “Edwama.”

In the last three months of DailyKos reader polls, Edwards and Obama have combined for more than 60 percent of the vote – as against only 8 percent for Clinton.

Despite being hammered by corporate media, Edwards retains deep Netroots support as he pushes a progressive, populist message that evokes Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. Fueled by Internet fundraising, Obama has inspired a huge grassroots following, especially among youth and people of color. Both are tagging Clinton as the candidate of moneyed lobbyists. Either – especially Edwards – would likely appoint a cabinet quite different than the corporate Clintonites one would get from Hillary. At this stage, it looks like only Edwards or Obama can beat Clinton; polls of Iowa Democrats show a three-way race among them.

Were Edwards or Obama to drop out of the race today, Netroots support would likely galvanize behind the other. The current 63-8 percent “Edwama” edge over Clinton among Kossacks would become at least a 50-15 percent landslide for Edwards or for Obama. (And it’s hard to argue Clinton is more electable in a general election, since she provokes even more loathing among conservatives than wariness among progressive activists.)

The reality is that neither Edwards nor Obama is dropping out. There is no Dean candidate at the moment.

But that should not prevent Netroots leaders and progressive bloggers from speaking out loudly and clearly about their objections to Clinton’s policies and associations, and the negative consequences of her leading the Democrats in 2008 – in long-term electability, governance and movement building.

* *

Reporting the results of his July straw poll in which Edwama outpolled Clinton 7 to 1, DailyKos founder Markos gloated that he was among the 5 percent who voted “No Freakin’ Clue”: “I’m enjoying the campaigns without any emotional investment in any of them. It’s quite liberating. I wish more of you would give it a shot.”

Here was a key Netroots backer of Dean sitting on the sidelines four years later, encouraging a laissez-faire attitude over who is the 2008 Democratic nominee.

If 2004 taught anything, it’s that it matters mightily who the nominee is. Despite all the organizing, fundraising, phone-banking, canvassing and concertizing, it’s hard to beat even a discredited Republican with a Democratic candidate who comes across as a vacillating and calculating Washington insider.

I was never prouder to be a MoveOn member as when, after Kerry’s defeat, Eli Pariser of MoveOn PAC blasted corporate Democrats in a mass email: “For years, the Party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base. But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.” Eli’s email called for a “bold Democratic vision” – not a phrase typically associated with Hillary Clinton.

In a bit of hyperbole, Eli proclaimed on behalf of grassroots donors who’d given $300 million to Kerry and the Democrats: “Now it’s our Party. We bought it, we own it, we’re going to take it back.” But unlike owners, Netroots leaders today act more like field hands – deferring to other powers the selection of the candidate.

If Clinton coasts to the Democratic nomination without need of Netroots support, the “elite Washington insiders” denounced by Eli will be laughing – ad commissions in hand – all the way to the bank.

And they’ll be ridiculing the Netroots as a paper tiger.

Below I propose a few questions I’d like to hear tonight. I don’t submit these as a disgruntled former MSNBC employee. If disgruntlement were my motivation, I’d be urging Keith to ask the candidates what they think about a TV network like MSNBC that operates union-free, where management ordered producers in the run-up to the Iraq invasion to favor pro-invasion guests. (MSNBC was as complicit as Fox News in promoting Bush’s Iraq disaster.)

Rather, I submit the following questions as a lifelong union supporter, and a former union steward. These aren’t the easy questions that allow Democrats to all place themselves on one side, with Bush on the other. These are the ones that divide Democrats.

These questions focus on polices that affect the lives and livelihoods of most Americans — in other words, the kind of questions that hold little interest for the Beltway pundit elite that prefers covering politics as a Hillary/Obama celebrity feud.

TRADE: The last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton, worked ferociously alongside big business lobbyists to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over the objections of labor, environmentalists and consumer advocates, whose fears of NAFTA’s negative impacts have largely materialized. During his 1992 campaign, Mr. Clinton had expressed concerns about NAFTA before becoming its main booster once in the White House.

How can you — especially those of you who supported NAFTA — assure voters that, if elected, you will not bend to corporate pressures to pass corporate-drafted trade deals that undermine labor and environmental protections?

If elected, will you work to repeal NAFTA?

HEALTHCARE: By removing private insurance (and its waste, red tape, sales commissions, CEO salaries, profits) from healthcare, Congressional studies have found that streamlined, single-payer Medicare for All would save society billions of dollars. Many experts see it as the only path to quality, universal coverage. In March, the AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed expanding Medicare to the whole country. Hundreds of labor groups — including eight national unions, 21 state federations and 81 central labor councils — specifically endorse John Conyers’ H.R. 676, the “Enhanced Medicare for All” bill sponsored by 76 members of Congress.

Excepting Mr. Kucinich who co-sponsors H.R. 676, please explain why you oppose “Enhanced Medicare for All.”

How many of you have seen Michael Moore’s movie, SiCKO? If you’ve seen it, do you disagree with Moore’s thesis that for-profit insurers deform our system and that healthcare is a right, not a commodity to be purchased? If you haven’t seen it, why not?

Follow up for Mr. Obama: You’ve repeatedly stated that when it comes to healthcare policy, insurance companies should get a seat at the table, but not every seat. Should Halliburton have a seat at the table when military or foreign policy is made?

IRAQ: U.S. soldiers and reservists in Iraq are mostly working people or the children of working people — not the children of laptop warriors from the pundit elite. With Congressional unpopularity rivaling that of President Bush as the Iraq occupation drags on, 70 members of the U.S. House recently sent an open letter to the President with a clear declaration: “We are writing to inform you that we will only support additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during Fiscal Year 2008 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of all our troops out of Iraq before you leave office.”

Will you join tonight in pledging no additional funds except for the “protection and safe redeployment of all our troops out of Iraq”? If not, why not?

IRAQ’S OIL: Democratic leaders in Congress have joined the White House in declaring passage of a proposed Iraqi oil law as a “benchmark” of progress. While the proposed law calls for oil revenues to be shared among Iraq’s regions and ethnic groups, it would open Iraq’s vast oil reserves to foreign oil companies, under contracts of up to 30 years. Privatization is why many Iraqis –- including the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions — oppose the bill. Mr. Kucinich has urged Democrats to drop the oil law as a “benchmark,” saying that privatization pressure tends to confirm that the “purpose of the war is about oil.”

Do you believe that the proposed oil law giving a green light to foreign firms should be pushed on the government and people of Iraq?

** Note to activists in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond: Having worked in television, I’m not naïve about what can be accomplished in a 90-minute TV forum. If Keith and the union folks don’t get to these questions tonight, feel free to use any of them in the coming weeks as candidates campaign in your communities.

For years Team Bush has sought to shroud their devastating and deepening Iraq occupation in the myth of troop protection. When they doled out contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater, it was about “funding the troops.” Even as VA health services were threatened, it was about “funding the troops.” Every yearly extension of the Iraq occupation is about “funding the troops.”

As Democratic leaders in Congress moved to hoist the white flag of surrender this week — giving Bush/Cheney billions more for Iraq without any timeline for withdrawal — we heard Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly assuring the media that before Memorial Day, “We will have legislation to fund the troops!”

The shared pretense of the White House and Democratic leaders is that funding the Iraq occupation is somehow a program on behalf of the troops. Like a subsidy for family farmers.

Instead of challenging this misleading rhetoric by saying “The only way to support the troops is by ending an unwinnable occupation and fully funding a safe withdrawal,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid proclaims, “We will never abandon our troops in a time of war.” Along with the utterly confused: “No one wants us to succeed in Iraq more than the Democrats.”

What Democrats need to be saying, repeatedly, is that it’s Bush/Cheney who abandoned several thousand U.S. troops to avoidable deaths in a disastrous occupation, and tens of thousands to horrible injuries. And that they’re willing to abandon still more troops to unnecessary death and injury. Democrats also need to talk about polls that consistently show most U.S. troops in Iraq support withdrawal, as do most Iraqis.

As Military Families Speak Out says: “Funding the war is not supporting our troops. The way to support our troops is to bring them home now and take care of them when they get here.”

Yet Democratic leaders are helping Bush/Cheney win the linguistic argument by pledging they won’t “abandon the troops.” The image Republicans want to plant in our head is that of a U.S. solider abandoned, unarmed on an Iraqi mean street. And that’s exactly the image Democratic rhetoric keeps reinforcing. They’re on the “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” defensive.

I’m well aware that recent Congressional proposals to withdraw combat troops did not win a majority (receiving 171 votes in the House and 29 in the Senate) — let alone the 2/3 needed to override a Bush veto. But one reason for their defeats is that Democrats are fighting the Iraq debate on enemy terrain.

Another reason is that dozens of Democrats in Congress, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, seem bent on endless war. With such Democrats, don’t bother challenging their rhetoric. Better to challenge them in next year’s primaries.

At the beginning of his rise 25 years ago, it was mainstream media complicity and gullibility that helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority and the myth of its clout. As documented in Tina Rosenberg’s 1982 Washington Monthly piece, “How the Media Made the Moral Majority,” Team Falwell repeatedly violated the Ninth Commandment by misleading journalists about their numbers and power.

Despite hundreds of outlandishly inaccurate, uninformed, and bigoted comments over the years (not just the three you may have heard last night), Falwell remained a respected fixture in TV news. The TV producer’s friend – he didn’t need to know much about a topic to say yes to the invitation.

In FAIR’s exhaustive study of ABC Nightline’s guest list during the mid-1980s, Falwell was one of the show’s most frequent guests; he offered his expertise about homosexuality on one episode, and about AIDS on another. (Falwell saw AIDS as a holy punishment of gays, and once asked why people with AIDS were not quarantined like infected cattle.)

My only direct experiences with Falwell were fittingly with Falwell, the TV pundit. We did battle via TV studios, his natural habitat. As a paid pundit at MSNBC in 2002, I had colorful on-air debates with Falwell (described in my book, “Cable News Confidential”).

When I debated Falwell in 2002 on whether to invade Iraq, he pointed his pudgy finger at Saddam Hussein as having been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Falwell was a Republican team player – blaming 9/11 on Saddam was now more important than blaming it on feminists, gays, and the ACLU, as he’d done on September 13.

During another MSNBC debate we had on the separation of church and state, Falwell was in fine form and in love with his own voice: “Much of public education today,” he intoned, “is designed to create an atheistic society that totally repudiates our religious heritage. This is a nation under God!”

Near the end of the debate, I restated a point I’d opened with that Falwell had not answered: “Rev. Falwell, if we are a nation under God, it’s interesting that the founders of our Constitution, our framers, didn’t even put the word [God] in the Constitution. That was by design.”

“You haven’t read it very clearly,” Falwell responded. “Let me correct you on that. The Constitution is dated 1787 in the year – of – our – Lord.”

He slowed down to enunciate each precious word, considering it a “gotcha” moment. Falwell and I were on a split screen; as he sternly pointed his finger at me, I shook my head, face in my hands, in disbelief.

The debate closed with Falwell continuing to a big finale: “The separation of church and state is a myth,” declared the preacher, “like global warming.”

We were now on split-screen – with me laughing at the ignorance I’d just heard. Falwell appeared very self-satisfied over his pro-God/anti-environment twofer.

For years after, the factually challenged Reverend continued as a TV pundit. By contrast, I was silenced for political reasons as the Iraq war neared. With the media cheerleading for war, the last thing TV news wanted was sober and accurate caution about the impact of an Iraq invasion. TV prefers the Falwells and Ann Coulters and Frank Gaffneys.

Instead of so much gushing about how Falwell had involved “values voters” in our democracy, it would be nice to see some introspection from TV news about its own role in foisting factually challenged right-wing bigots on the American public to the near-exclusion of informed, progressive voices.