On this tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, both Joe Scarborough and Luke Russert attempted to do a bit of revisionist history this Tuesday morning on MSNBC and Salon's Alex Pareene did a fine job of taking them apart for it.

MSNBC selectively remembers the Iraq War:

Updated: Morning Joe and Luke Russert leave out some important context. Like how much MSNBC pushed for war

MSNBC today ran two very interesting segments addressing the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. In one, Luke Russert interviewed veteran NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel on the state of Iraq today (spoiler: not great). In another, Joe Scarborough hosted a large panel to discus how the Iraq War happened and what went wrong.

The Russert segment is sort of bizarre, referring to “that big anniversary” and completely ignoring the reasons the Iraq War started. It concludes — after Engel explains how Iraq is once again in a sectarian civil war — with Russert essentially asserting the inevitability of a military strike against Iran, saying they could be “months” away from building nuclear weapons. [...]

Both of these segments show how incredibly little anyone learned from very recent history. [...]

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After over-hyping the claims by Bob Woodward on The Situation Room just the day before that the White House supposedly threatened him, CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin ended up doing some back tracking on this Thursday's show, after the emails released by Politico revealed that he wasn't being threatened after all. Even though they both eventually admitted that the emails were not threatening at all, both of them were desperate to cling to the notion that Woodward might have still have some legitimate reason to feel threatened by the White House.

Blitzer asked Yellin if she thought "maybe this sidebar is being overblown?" which might be the understatement of the day. You think so Wolf? Overblown by whom exactly? Woodward played CNN and the rest of the right like a fiddle and as John already noted here, all of them were missing the forest for the trees when it comes to the substance in Sperling and Woodward's email exchange and the fact that the White House is still willing to throw their base under the bus with these negotiations.

CNN, still doing their best to be Fox-lite. And note to Wolf Blitzer, Bob Woodward quit acting like a "premier journalist" ages ago. Now he's a right wing hack with an axe to grind. The good news out of all of this though, according to Wolf Blitzer, is that Gene Sperling is going to come on the air with Candy Crowley this weekend to talk about this nonsense. I await learning nothing of value during that interview.

Here's more from Gawker on Woodward: Goodbye, Bob

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Author Bob Woodward on Sunday blasted Republican strategist Karl Rove for creating a super PAC that acts as a Soviet-style "Politburo" with the de facto power to decide Republican primaries.

During a panel segment on Fox News Sunday, Rove insisted that he had founded the Conservative Victory Project super PAC to "avoid having stupid candidates who can't win general elections... because this money is too difficult to raise to be spending it on behalf of candidates who have little chance of winning in general elections."

Also appearing on the panel, Woodward seemed shocked that Rove was still successful in courting Republican donors after his American Crossroads super PAC got only only a 1 percent return on $103 million in spending during 2012 election.

"My last book is going to be called 'Some People Never Go Away' and Karl's going to get his own chapter because he never goes away," Woodward snarked. "Maybe two chapters because you never know what the next bounce will be with you."

"But what's interesting is the focus on money," he conintued. "I think the problem in the Republican Party is really not money. I think they've got lots of it. I think it is theory of the case, 'Why are we here? What is our message? How to connect to the real world?' And this idea about $30 million [in campaign spending] here or we're going to do that, I think is the wrong track."

"A lot of this is just examining these candidates, looking at their record, doing the kind of research on ourselves that the other side is already going to be doing and trying to have discussions behind the scenes among conservative groups as to how strong are these respective candidates," Rove explained.

Woodward interrupted: "But you're going to set yourself up as a kind of Politburo vetting these candidates. I mean, the whole theory of Republicanism is to let the local, state or district decide."

"We believe in markets," Rove replied. "It's just the opposite of the Politburo. The more people that participate, the better off we are. The more we examine the quality of these candidates from top to bottom, the more likely we end up with fewer Christine O'Donnells and more Rand Pauls."

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Now that it appears Republicans' backs are against the wall on whether taxes are going to go up for the wealthiest among us one way or the other, Bill Kristol decided to double down on his remarks that Republican Party shouldn't "fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires." I don't think he got the Koch brothers' approval for the claim he made this Sunday, which is that there are a lot of "tea party" guys that "don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes."

Tell that to their leaders Bill. That seems to be all they care about. These AstroTurf groups know who they're beholden to and who is funding them. Of course he qualified that by saying they'd accept it because it would lead to the "grand bargain" they're all pining for and tax rates being lowered later as part of that deal. So I don't think he's completely off the reservation as Bob Woodward asserted here. The truth of the matter is, Republicans are not bargaining from a position of strength right now, and Kristol and the rest of them know it, whether they're willing to admit it or not.

Here's the exchange from Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: And let me explain what came out of the meeting on Friday, is the idea, is a two-step compromise, that there is a down payment and there's talk about $50 billion, perhaps, by the end of the year and, then a promise with triggers they would achieve a grand bargain -- heard that word before -- next year, major tax reform, major entitlement reform.

Bill Kristol, how realistic is that two step approach.

KRISTOL: I think it is pretty realistic. I think -- and I think Republicans are going -- there will be a deal by December 31, and I believe Republicans will yield a bit on top rates. I mean, President Obama ran twice on this platform and he won last I looked, both presidential elections.

He's...

WALLACE: What was the reaction - you made a lot of news last week when you said it wouldn't kill Republicans to raise the top rate. In fact, as you know, you were favorably cited not by name, by the president during his news conference. I'm sure that shot your credibility...

KRISTOL: That was bad. That was a bad moment. But you know you've got to persevere, even when these things happen.

WALLACE: What was the reaction among Republicans?

KRISTOL: The private reaction one Republican congressman was honestly, including very conservative ones, was, I don't know, do we really have to give anything - I guess maybe we do. Maybe it was good that you said that, because we need to cut a deal.

He won two elections. He didn't raise rates correctly in 2009 because we were in the midst of a horrible downturn. Republicans won a huge off year election in 2010 and were able to bargain to a status quo deal. I just don't think Republicans have the leverage, or that it's worth using all their - whatever leverage they have, to maintain rates at 35 percent instead of 37 or 38, especially if you can take it up to millionaires.

I just don't think it's economically as a matter of policy important enough.

Then the big deal has to be big tax reform with lower rates, I think.

WALLACE: 30 seconds left, Bob. And this was the subject of your book. How optimistic are you that they make a deal and avert the fiscal cliff?

WOODWARD: well, let's hope they do. But they are going to burn Bill Kristol's Tea Party card hearing him talk like this. You are off the reservation.

KRISTOL: You know, a lot of the Tea Party guys don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes, honestly.

WALLACE: But are you optimistic.

WOODWARD: Well, you have to - because if this isn't fixed we're going to have a global catastrophe.

WALLACE: On that happy note, thank you. See you next week.

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Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Sunday asserted that former President Bill Clinton's Democratic National Convention speech highlighting Barack Obama's accomplishments was "actually a condemnation" of the current president.

"I actually thought parts of the Clinton speech were eerily anti-Obama," Gingrich told Candy Crowley during an interview on CNN. "I mean, here's Clinton saying, 'I reformed welfare because I worked with Republicans, you didn't, Mr. Obama.' Think about it. 'I had the longest period of economic growth in history, you didn't, Mr. Obama. I got to four balanced budgets by working with Republicans, you didn't, Mr. Obama.'"

"You can take his speech, spin it not very much, and it's actually a condemnation of the fact that Obama learned nothing -- and Bob Woodward's new book indicates he learned nothing -- out of the 2010 election," the former House Speaker explained, adding that Obama's bounce in the polls after the Democratic Convention was "80 percent Bill Clinton."

"Clinton is a very popular figure for a very practical reason: the economy worked," Gingrich noted. "You know, you look back on that and you think -- I think what it actually does is it shrinks Obama. I mean, you have a real president and then you have this guy who's a pretender."

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

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After showing a number of clips in the run up to the next segment where Michele Bachmann clearly showed she didn't have a lot of use for either facts or concern for flame throwing, the panel on The Chris Matthews Show pondered whether the now very "serious" and now "disciplined" Michele Bachmann somehow has her finger on the pulse of the Republican electorate in America.

What was amazing to me is that even after showing how off the cliff Bachmann is and that there is no way in hell she should be elected to lead this country, they pretty much calmly discussed how the Republican Party has gone off the rails, and without explaining just how dangerous someone like Bachmann would be should the American public actually turn out to be insane enough to elect her, and pondered whether Bachmann now represents the heart of the Republican Party.

I never thought I'd live see the day when our beltway Villagers were seriously discussing Michele Bachmann's potential road to the presidential nomination, but here we are.

MATTHEWS: Andrea, I hear something there that's powerful. It's connecting the regular people, the base of the country, the regular people and their sense of conservative history, their conservative view of history.

MITCHELL: I think you're actually right and there's a new PEW poll which says that people do not want to see their Medicare, Social Security, I mean, not surprisingly, they don't want to see their benefits cut, they don't want to see taxe increases. The majority of people in this country are not willing to do the things that John Boehner is now prepared apparently to do, that the President wants us to do, that leadership, arguably needs to do in order to get past this crisis.

Michele Bachmann really has her finger on that pulse. She's put up a new ad, her first ad in Iowa, which said I will not vote for a debt ceiling.

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The panel on The Chris Matthews Show this weekend did their best to try to soften how disgusted most of us should be after watching George W. Bush’s upcoming interview which will be aired on NBC this Monday with Matt Lauer.

LAUER: “I can never forget what happened to America that day. I would pour my heart and soul into protecting this country, whatever it took.”

BUSH: Yeah.

LAUER: It took thousands of lives, American lives, billions of dollars; you could say it took Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib…

BUSH: Yeah.

LAUER: And government eavesdropping and waterboarding. Did it take too much?

BUSH: We didn’t have an attack. 3000 people died on September the 11th and I vowed that I would do my duty to protect the American people and uhm…they didn’t get hit again.

Chris Matthews went on to ask how Obama would have handled the aftermath of 9-11 and if he’d have reacted differently than Bush, like he doesn’t know that answer all ready. Bob Woodward pointed out that al Qaeda was not present in Iraq until after we invaded them.

The part of this discussion that really got under my skin was this statement by Katy Kay.

KAY: The sort of political extraordinariness of the Bush administration was that Cheney managed to convince 70% of American people that Iraq was, that Saddam Hussein was directly behind Iraq. (I think she meant to say 9-11 here.)

So in other words, it was Dick Cheney’s fault that he was allowed to lie to the public and not the media for failing to alert the public to the fact that he was lying. Okay Katy. Nothing like relinquishing on your responsibilities if you want to call yourself “journalists.”

Mrs. Greenspan followed that by doing her best to carry a little water for the Bush administration by pretending that they really were concerned about a threat from Iraq until Chris Matthews pointed out that the CIA didn’t agree with them.

Bob Woodward went on to trivialize any of Colin Powell’s objections to the wisdom of our invasion even though we all know he went on to give that speech to the UN where he carried water for Bush with fear mongering over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

The panel spent most of the rest of the segment talking about whether George W. Bush and his father disagreed or not over his decision to invade Iraq, like that means a damn thing now when it comes to all of the lives and money wasted there.

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What in the hell were the panelists on The Chris Matthews Show smoking this weekend? They're still trying to pretend like the Democrats are going to be able to get the Republicans to work with them on health care. I'm in the camp with Lawrence O'Donnell who said he thinks the bill is dead when he was subbing for Ed Schultz. Even though they pointed out that the Republicans have absolutely no incentive to work with the Democrats we got these tidbits of "wisdom" from them.

Bob Woodward thinks they need a panel or some sort of commission and should just start over. John Heilemann cites some polls and says there's no incentive for them to work with Democrats. Katy Kay thinks they need to start again on the issue of cost. Gloria Borger says the Democrats had better get their act together before the summit later this month (too late now Gloria). And even though she admits it's not likely the House will vote yes on a bill where they give up everything they wanted in their version, she says the President needs to do some "triangulation" and cut a deal which leaves them behind. How that's going to get them to vote for it is beyond me. Woodward follows up with saying again they need to start over and get something bipartisan passed after the election.

If we end up with more Republicans in the Congress after the election, again, why he thinks they're going to cooperate later is beyond me. Katy Kay says they just need some better messaging. If the Democrats were going to get something passed they'd have done it already. Right now they don't even look like they care if they get blown out in the next election. It's a little late for that better messaging Katy.

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Chris Matthews seems to think that bloggers don’t do any fact checking, and that we’re going to lose that if the newspaper industry goes out of business. While it’s true that beat reporters and those doing the footwork out there are sorely needed, to say that bloggers don’t fact check is just a cheap shot at the on line community that he and his ilk have such disdain for, probably because we’re the main ones fact checking the likes of him.

What Matthews fails to note here is why the industry is in such bad shape. The Economist lays out some of the problems in their article Who Killed the Newspaper.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

Ironically we see Bob Woodward saying journalism lives on after playing stenographer for the Bush crowd to get some books sold rather than reporting on what he found out. And he holds up Tina Brown’s operation at The Daily Beast as a business model for making money on line and some hope for journalism's future.

Just how different would this conversation have been with a completely different panel? The viewers might have learned something had it been our own Dave Neiwert and Susie Madrak who’ve worked in the newspaper industry and turned to blogging instead, and Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo and Eric Boehlert from Media Matters, who’s sites look more like the future of journalism to me.

When the fourth estate doesn't do its job, people are going to turn to other sources that will. Something that seems to completely elude Chris Matthews and his panel here.

Another thing Matthews fails to note is that most bloggers who use other people’s reporting link back to that material and allow their readers to evaluate their assertions for themselves. We are not just taking stenography from press releases or other people’s reporting. And when we get something wrong, there’s generally a swift retraction. Something you cannot say for too many in our “mainstream media” who tend to circle the wagons rather than admit mistakes. And while Joe Klein is claiming that his commenters “fact check” him, just how many of those comments does he actually read?

Transcript below the fold.

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The panel of Bob Woodward, Kelly O'Donnell, Anne Kornblut and Howard Fineman making excuses for the Obama administration and Congress if there are no prosecutions for torture committed by the Bush administration.

Matthews: How do you read that...what he just said?

Woodward: No. In other words he's not going to, he doesn't want investigations. I mean if, first of all in some of these things, it's so ambiguous and uh, he has got to get beyond the past. He does not want to create the feeling, which in a sense this week he did create by saying he's going to close Guantanamo, that the war on terror is over. It is not over. What he said is some of the tactics, namely torture and harsh interrogation tactics are gone but the war continues and if there is a, some sort of perpetual investigation of these things the message will be we're going soft and I tell you those in the intelligence world and the military and I think Obama himself doesn't want to send that message.

Matthews: Well let's talk about the Republicans on the Hill. What are they worried, aren't they trying to hold Eric Holder's feet to the fire and say "Promise you won't launch an investigation as our new Attorney General".

O'Donnell: Well one of the problems is if they do dig back into all of these things you do lose some of the Republicans support and President Obama's trying to reach out. You also reinforce what detractors of the Bush/Cheney years already think. So there's very little political upside. And so Eric Holder has been certainly tested and they definitely, Republicans definitely want to be able to feel like they can stick with their strong principle of defense without having to worry about digging back into some of those things.

Matthews: Yeah. Anne obviously the people on the left, the netroots people, John Conyers up on the Hill, they want action. They want some kind of at least an extra-legal kind of truth and reconciliation commission like you had in South Africa that doesn't prosecute but does investigate.

Kornblut: And yet we haven't heard any signal from Obama or the White House itself that they would authorize that, encourage it. Even something that would be as sort of as benign as a truth and reconciliation commission, every indication is they want to leave that to reporters, historians. They want to move on, you know the Hill can do what the Hill can do, but they're not behind it.

Matthews: Well why did we prosecute people at Abu Ghraib for abusing prisoners if we're not going to prosecute people who may have authorized that kind of treatment?

Fineman: It is an issue. But Obama has to run the country and he and the leaders of the Democratic Party on the Hill have said "It's not worth the cost". I mean I know that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate wants no parts of this. Whatever John Conyers is going to do on the House side, he's going to do and you'll hear a lot of noise from him and maybe some investigations. But it's not going to be backed up by the Democratic leadership in Congress. It just isn't.

(crosstalk)

Woodward: Well who would you investigate and prosecute? I mean the people who did these interrogations and so forth believed with good reason they had authority from the President.

Matthews: They had orders.

Woodward: Now you know it's too late to impeach Bush. It's over.