Non-Texan pseudoliberal media stupidity on #RickPerry

From Michael Lind, through Jonathan Chait and even to the New York Times editorial board, we have teh stupidz populating allegedly semi-liberal media spots.

Lind didn't even mention that special prosecutor Michael McCrum, rather than Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, got the Travis grand jury to indict Perry. He doesn't even mention any special prosecutor, let alone McCrum by name. Worse, he claims that Bug Man, Tom DeLay, has been acquitted, when this is, to be blunt, a lie. (I have no tolerance for Lind on this, especially since he puffily declares himself a fourth-generation native Texan.) The reality is that DeLay appealed his conviction and a state appeals court agreed. Lehmberg appealed that to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which agreed to hear the case this spring and has yet to act.

Until DeLay's criminal process is exhausted with an acquittal at the final level, he's not been acquitted.

Chait pulls out the snark about prosecutors getting grand juries to indict ham sandwiches. Worse yet, writing for the New Yorker, Mr. Neoliberal USA pulls out faux modesty like this:

I am but a humble country blogger. And yet, having read the indictment, legal training of any kind seems unnecessary to grasp its flimsiness.

What a moron. He, like Lind, overlooks McCrum's nonpartisan background, including that John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchinson supported him being named U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.

The Times does no better than Chait minus the snark.

None of the three mention the special power of the Travis DA's Public Integrity Unit and why that makes this so special of a situation. Even more, none of the three connect that investigative work to Perry's "interesting" finances with the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.

Lind and Chait are both "right" neoliberals, a shade or two to the right of Obama but careful to not be more than that. The NYT editorial board? A conglomeration of staff from "the paper of record." Enough said.

Laziness on its part and Chait's (at best). Deliberate corner-cutting by Lind.

And, I'll halfway add Matt Bai to the list now, too. Much of this article is good, about why Obama hasn't been a new LBJ, but he disgresses from there, in comparing Obama to several current governors, to say this:

He'll soon be indicted on charges that he tried to bully a Democratic district attorney from office after she was picked up for drunken driving, first by vetoing her state funds and then by offering to restore them only if she quit. Apparently, obnoxiousness is now a crime in Texas, albeit one of the few that can't get you executed.

It's not as bad as the folks above, and it is snarkier than them, but still. 

Beyond my previous blogging, Glenn Smith of Progress Texas explains why the indictment matters.