IT’S PROBABLY UNCOLLEGIAL OF ME to pick on Douglas Brinkley — I think that he and I have chapters in the same book coming out this summer — but his flacking for Kerry has gotten so bad that even lefty columnists are calling him on it:

These days Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry, the subject of Brinkley’s flattering bestseller “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.” Brinkley proclaims his independence from the Kerry campaign — “This is my book, not his,” he writes in “Tour” — but he’s become a major player in the Kerry agitprop machine.

On television, in magazines, and on Kerry’s website, Brinkley functions as a dependable surrogate for the candidate, quick to testify to Kerry’s unflinching qualities of heroism and leadership. . . .

It gets worse. After the Kerry campaign learned that the Globe had interviewed Gardner for its Kerry biography, Brinkley called Gardner. The presidential historian — Brinkley has written about Franklin Roosevelt and is a disciple of the late historian and biographer Stephen Ambrose — warned Gardner of a “firestorm” if the vet went public with his doubts about Kerry, and then hacked out an article attacking the former gunner’s mate on Time magazine’s website!

Hilariously, Kerry declined to talk to the Globe about Gardner’s criticisms, but graced Brinkley with his opinion — uncritically relayed by the historian — that Gardner’s stories were “made up.”

Who needs opposition research when Doug Brinkley is on the case?

Ouch.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

Dozens of internal United Nations audits of the troubled oil-for-food program in Iraq were routinely shown only to the U.N. official now at the center of an international scandal over kickbacks from the regime of Saddam Hussein, a congressional investigator said yesterday.

Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the General Accounting Office, told a House hearing that U.N. auditors had refused to release the internal audits to GAO investigators probing the scandal that poured an estimated $10.1 billion from secret oil sales and inflated contracts into Saddam’s coffers under the U.N. program.

Stonewalling. Imagine that!

UPDATE: Then there’s the this:

April 29, 2004 — WASHINGTON – The vast majority of the United Nations’ oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.

It’s not so mysterious, really. . . .

If this doesn’t prove that the United Nations isn’t up to the job, I don’t know what does. It’s time for a top-to-bottom housecleaning, but it won’t happen. There are too many people with their hand in the till, and too many politicians with a vested interest in pretending that the United Nations is something like the United Federation of Planets, instead of the corrupt-yet-inept dictators’ defense fund that it really is.

FRITZ SCHRANCK has some firsthand observations on the state of the economy. Some of his reporting is from Pawley’s Island, a place where my family used to vacation regularly.

UPDATE: Fritz is certainly clearer than the guys at CBS Marketwatch, where the headline says “U.S. Growth Cools” — but the story tells us that GDP grew 4.2% last quarter as opposed to 4.1% the quarter before. That’s cooling? Apparently it is, when “economists, on average, had been expecting slightly stronger growth.” Sheesh. I don’t think this is political slant or anything. It’s just bad.

ALGERIA AGAIN:

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is investigating whether Islamic extremists infiltrated the nation by stowing away on Algerian liquefied natural gas tankers that docked in the Port of Boston and has concluded several stowaways may have had links to indicted Al Qaeda terrorists, officials disclosed yesterday.

Hmm. Given the enormous destructive potential of liquefied natural gas tankers, I hope we’re taking a very, very close look at these.

JAMES LILEKS:

In the future, I think, newspapers will become almost entirely devoted to local news and happy fluff, like me. I depend on my paper for local news, because I don’t watch TV news. . . .

That’s the niche that waits for them. The internet will swamp their ability to sum up the daily state of the world, because a) there’s so much available on the net from the big dogs, and b) small little-noted institutional biases in the paper’s selection of news stories will kill their credibility with those who sample from many sources.

Indeed.

A MARINE IN IRAQ is asking for your help.

JAY REDING:

Compare the silence on the UN scandal with the cacophony of stories on Enron, WorldCom, and Martha Stewart. There is a clear double standard at play here. When a corrupt CEO loses billions of dollars, it’s all over the news for weeks. When a member of the UN does it, it’s as though it never happened.

Well, there has been some coverage — but not that much, and certainly nothing like the drumbeat of stories we got on Enron when it first broke. Of course, some people thought that the Enron scandal would knock Bush out of office, while this scandal merely has the potential to undercut John Kerry’s multilateral approach to foreign policy and cost him the election. So there’s nothing to see here. . . .

PHOTOBLOGGING: Here’s a gallery of beautiful photos from Vietnam.

HUGH HEWITT played an embarrassing speech by Frank Lautenberg on his show today:

How to explain the Lautenberg melt-down? Well, many, many callers and e-mailers who heard me play the speech think he was drunk. I don’t.

Read the whole thing.

WHY NOT? EVERYBODY ELSE IS: Frank J. is offering advice to John Kerry. Sadly, some of it may actually be better than the advice he’s getting from the campaign staff. . .

WELL, THIS IS A TRADITIONAL METHOD of supporting the troops.

(Via who else?)

NANOTECHNOLOGY: A CAUTIONARY TALE. Best caveat: “Perhaps the most unlikely thing about this tale is the possibility of the side without a nanofactory being victorious in war.”

CATHY SEIPP HAS THE SCOOP ON THE SPIN SISTERS: The comments about bias and clueless elitism in women’s magazines sound like something the InstaWife might say.

I’LL NEVER TRUST NIGHTLINE AGAIN — because its producer, Leroy Sievers, claims to be unaware of when ratings sweeps take place:

Koppel, also in the announcement, acknowledged that Memorial Day might have been “the most logical occasion” to do the program. Ya think?

“But we felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on war dead,” he said.

Ah yes, and, of course, Memorial Day falls outside the May sweeps, when viewer levels are used by the networks to set advertising rates. Memorial Day is also traditionally a day of very low television viewing. He forgot to mention that stuff.

Sievers and others we spoke with at ABC News insisted they did not realize that the May sweeps start tomorrow.

So Nightline is staffed by either clueless idiots unfit to work in TV, or by shameless liars who think we’ll fall for anything. Which is it?

Who cares?

UPDATE: Reader David Whidden asks: “Did Ted Koppel ever read the names of the 3,000 people who died on September 11? Just wondering.”

Not to my knowledge.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Laurence Simon emails:

I worked at an ABC O&O down here in Houston for four and a half years. For anyone in ABC to say that they have no idea when sweeps starts, from the CEO down to a security guard, is quite possibly the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.

If he’s telling the truth, then it’s proof of why ABC is in fourth place out of the Big Three.

If he’s lying, then he’s got a bright future as a potential head of ABC News.

Heh. Meanwhile reader David Walser emails: “Maybe Ted could read the names of those Saddam would have killed, raped, or tortured had he remained in power.”

I’d settle for him reading the names of the people who got oil-money from Saddam as part of the oil-for-food scandal. . . .

MORE: Ted Koppel: “When we began taking our journalism more lightly, people began taking us less seriously.”

Well said!

STILL MORE: Reader John Reandeau emails:

If Nightline’s stunt is news and not a political statement, then why are they leaving out the names of those who have died in Operation Enduring Freedom? As Pat Tillman made us aware, we still have Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan as well. The deliberate separation of Iraq from the rest of the War on Terror is agenda journalism at its best. I love the idea of remembering and naming our military dead. But I detest the way Koppel intends to exploit them.

-John
PS – If I had a Neilsen diary, I wouldn’t be watching.

Me neither.

BLACKFIVE brings us thoughts of a sort quite alien to Michael Moore.

GROWING ANTI-MULLAH SENTIMENT IN IRAN? Stephen Green posts a lengthy and detailed report.

SPOONS HAS THE UNSCAM COVERAGE ALL FIGURED OUT: And with a handy chart!

A CAUTIONARY NOTE: Kerry’s various gaffes have got Bush supporters feeling pretty good this week. But I don’t think that the Kerry campaign’s misfortunes will continue forever, and the Bush people need to recognize that his campaign has its own issues. He’s entirely capable of losing this election, despite all the help he’s currently getting from the Kerry campaign’s screwups.

In particular, I still think that they should get rid of Cheney in favor of Condi Rice. Cheney’s contribution to the ticket the first time around was (as we heard over and over again) gravitas. Bush doesn’t need him for that now. Cheney also has a lot of baggage, which Bush also doesn’t need. And his role in the Administration is open to question — I’ve recently spoken to a couple of current and former Administration folks, with no particular axes to grind, who think that Cheney’s doing considerably more harm than good.

Of course, if they were planning a move like that, it would be smart to wait until later to announce it. . . .

UPDATE: On the other hand, Daniel Drezner has a piece in TNR that explains Kerry’s problems well: “The problem is not that Bush is unbeatable; the problem is that he seems unbeatable when compared to Kerry.”

I think he’s onto something in his analysis, which isn’t as snarky as that sentence standing alone makes it sound.

THANKS! For some reason, a bunch of people hit the Amazon and PayPal donation buttons yesterday. Or maybe for no reason at all. (Hey, who needs a reason?)

Anyway, thanks a lot. It’s a much appreciated antidote to the hatemail. For some reason, the hatemailers seldom send money.

ANOTHER PHOTO REPORT FROM INDC, this one from the anti-IMF protests.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein’s description of this report is, um, much more colorful than the one above.

Yeah, like that’s a surprise.

IT SEEMS I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE to make a Kerry-Dole comparison.

JEFF JARVIS HAS A ROUNDUP OF IRAQI BLOG POSTS: The UN and USA Today are getting criticized, though for different reasons.

MORE ON UNSCAM:

Why did France and Russia oppose efforts to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime? And why did they press constantly, throughout the ’90s, for an expansion of Iraqi oil sales? Was it their empathy for the starving children of that impoverished nation? Their desire to stop the United States from arrogantly imposing its vision upon the Middle East?

It now looks like they it was simply because they were on the take. Saddam was their cash cow. If President Bush has suffered some discredit over his apparently false – but not disingenuous – claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the lapse is minor compared to the outright personal selfishness and criminality that appears to have motivated many of those who opposed his efforts to rid the world of one of its worst dictators. . . .

The defect of international coalitions is that they include the just and the unjust, the bribed and the honest, the democratic and the autocratic. And their members cannot be trusted equally. The group that stood up and backed the invasion of Iraq was nicknamed “the Coalition of the Willing.” Now it appears it was also “the Coalition of the Honest.”

The press’s relative lack of interest in this colossal scandal — which dwarfs anything involving Enron or Martha Stewart — is hard to explain. As reader Brian Naughton writes:

With the UNscam story unravelling almost daily, no one seems to be talking about the CEO of UN Inc. I’m referring, of course to Kofi Annan. If this guy isn’t complicit in these crimes he would have to be the most astoundingly incompetent CEO in recent history, perhaps ever!

Yes. It’s interesting that he’s not getting the kind of treatment that corporate CEO’s get, notwithstanding that this is likely the biggest financial-fraud scandal in history.

UPDATE: Mystery writer Roger Simon is looking for this scandal’s Mr. Big.

MORE KERRY WORRIES:

In recent appearances, Mr. Kerry’s digressions and obfuscations about whether he threw a war medal or a ribbon on the White House lawn in 1971—or whether the young Mr. Kerry should have used the word “war crimes” to describe actions in Vietnam—have obscured the candidate. At every turn, he has managed to turn the TV screen into smoked glass: He’s right in front of you, but you can’t … quite … make … him … out. With his morose patrician mien and robotic delivery—parodied with precision by Jon Stewart on the Monday, April 24, Daily Show, surely not a good thing for the candidate—Mr. Kerry’s TV performances are sounding a gut-level alarm about his ability to inspire confidence in the electorate. . . .

“I’m not sure what the message is—that may be the essence of the problem,” said Joe McGinniss, the author of The Selling of the President, the best-seller that detailed Richard M. Nixon’s media strategy. As a Massachusetts resident, Mr. McGinniss said he had never seen Mr. Kerry do well on TV—or even in public, for that matter.

I’m pretty sure that if John Edwards were the presumptive nominee, we wouldn’t be hearing so much voters’ remorse from Democrats. This sounds like Bob Dole all over again: He can’t connect with the public, he’s unappealing on TV, but we’ll nominate him anyway! Did we mention he’s a war hero? They always win!

DONALD RUMSFELD ON BIAS FROM THE PRESS:

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.

Ouch. (Via CPT Patti).