“She misspoke,” said Lanny Davis, a White House lawyer and spokesman for President Bill Clinton. “Every day that goes by that they don’t say she misspoke and she used the wrong words … they just feed it and give it life and give Rush [Limbaugh] and [Sean] Hannity more airtime unnecessarily.”

What Lanny, and also Chris Lehane who is also quoted in the piece, just doesn’t get is that the era of the Democratic party that jumped when the increasingly irrelevant noise machine says “jump” is over – it died in the wreckage of the Kerry and Clinton campaigns. Davis, and a few straggling liberals think that what is said on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and talk radio actually matters to non-insane people.

It doesn’t.

And I was right.

Powers is the epitomy of a Fox News Democrat – a low level Clinton official who never did any strategizing or anything, who appointed herself a spokesperson for the Democratic party and does so by making poor arguments from the left and reliably bashing Democrats. That’s all Powers does, that’s her shtick.

And hidden underneath it all is an inferiority complex the size of Texas. Powers knows that she’s an inch deep and is highly sensitive to charges that she’s a fembot in the tradition of Fox’s other well-paid spinners. She’s on the channel to provide eye candy and reliably dump on Democrats with a smile. She’s symptomatic of the loser spirit of the 2000-2006 Democratic party, the one who believes that to win Democrats should just be Republicans.

She offers nothing new or insightful, which is why Rupert Murdoch’s business empire throws her up on TV and publishes her column in his newspaper.

So, yet another “Democrat” on Fox News who thinks its his job to kneecap Democrats. Is there anyone on Fox who is allowed to deviate from the con line?

Then again, Wolfson’s got a track record.

Conservatives long ago adapted to life in a world where watching the network news or picking up one of the major news dailies is a virtual guarantee of having their views mocked, demeaned or misrepresented. If you’re a social conservative, multiply the odds by 100.

But some liberals, unused to feeling such stings, view government intervention as a salve.

I happen to not like the Fairness Doctrine myself, but you don’t see me and others like me reading from conservative talking points like Kirsten Powers does when we talk about it.

Now see, that’s funny for him to use that line on me. There are three people responsible for every single bit of audio and video content on the Media Matters website. I am one of them. Ergo, it is part of my job to see the interactions Alan Colmes has with Sean Hannity, not to mention that I occasionally watch the show on my own time. And by any measure the bad outweighs the good.

I’ve seen in interviews where Colmes uses two major defenses to explain why liberals and Democrats almost uniformly find him lacking as a represenative – one was the one he used with me – that I don’t watch the show. The other one is also used by the other Fox News Democrat I’ve personally interacted with, Kirsten Powers, and it boils down to the idea that I and other liberals have some sort of idealogical litmus test they’re not living up to.

The only litmus test I’ve got for Democrats and progressives in the media is: don’t suck. On a one-to-one comparison there are few outright liberals in the media. Panels are almost made up of conservative activists and writers for conservative journals, paired with reporters for idealogically neutral news outlets. Special Report with Brit Hume, for instance regularly has the deck stacked with the conservative host Hume, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, conservative reporter Bill Sammon, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard (who wrote a recent hagiography of Bush) and Mort Kondracke from Roll Call (who recently called the Dems a “hanging” party). The “liberals” are Mara Liasson and Juan Williams, both straight reporters for NPR and regular regurgitators of beltway conventional wisdom against Democrats.

Furthermore, when it comes to ideology I’m probably to the right of Alan Colmes but to the left of Kirsten Powers.

Where I and many others rock the boat is in asking them not to suck. Far too often the Democrats on Fox, especially Colmes and Powers, buy wholeheartedly into conservative distortions and frames of Democrats. Dems, in the world of Fox, are always too much to the left, going too far, etc. and the Fox Dems literally break their own necks racing to agree with their conservative counterparts – Sean Hannity for Colmes, and Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin for Kirsten Powers. A lot of people would like to think this is an edict from up high at Fox, but the evidence seems to say otherwise. The bulk of Fox News Dems are appeasers like Colmes and Powers – Pat Caddell and Bob Beckel for instance. But folks like Gen. Wes Clark generally hold their ground even while being employees of the network. So it’s not the heavy hand of Roger Ailes, apparently, just this group self-selecting themselves as the Washington Generals of punditry.

I can’t read their minds to know why they do it, though Occam’s Razor says its the motivation of regular employment that keeps them in line. But for their own personal bounty they do damage to the Democratic party and the progressive movement.

They don’t see it that way – especially Kirsten Powers who seems to see all criticism as a critique of intelligence – but one can only work on the evidence that’s available, and the “patsy” motive seems to fit best. They want to be “in” with the cool kids, and on a pro-Republican network like Fox the in-crowd is the GOP. For the other progressive pundits on other cable networks, from the famous Begala and Carville (plus Donna Brazille) on CNN to the other lesser-known talking heads who regularly pop up on MSNBC, there is little to no capitulation like that seen on Fox News.

But my correspondence with Alan Colmes and Kirsten Powers suggests that they don’t see a problem. They discard the fact that again and again and again their inactions are noted by telling themselves we desire purity tests and dogmatism. With that attitude they are never subject to criticism because they reject it out of hand. They think it’s a license to continue throwing their supposed allies under the bus.

Frankly all we’re asking in return for you to not suck up the joint so much.

>> Kirsten Powers

And more from this story in Salon on the Fox News Democrats, the Washington Generals (ref) of punditry.

For example, in January, when discussing O’Reilly’s favorite new target, NBC News, whose cable channel MSNBC hosts O’Reilly nemesis (and former Salon columnist) Keith Olbermann. On this occasion, O’Reilly’s chosen line of attack was on William Arkin, a part-time NBC military analyst who wrote a controversial blog entry for the Washington Post about U.S. troops in Iraq. Powers, despite her opposition to the war in Iraq, used the occasion to hit out at blogs and the antiwar movement, likening Arkin’s writing to antiwar tropes coming out of the left, saying, “This was the type of thing that you would expect to read on a far left blog. It has all the hallmarks of the basic far left arguments, which is, you know, the reference to our sons and daughters. We have to save our sons and daughters. The reference to — they’re all pawns, they’re all stupid. They don’t actually want to be over there. The reference that they only support the war because they have to. What else would they do? They couldn’t get up in the morning unless they were.”

Moreover, while attacking the far left, Powers has also been hired as the liberal bookend to conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin on a yet-to-be-launched Fox show called “It’s Out There.” Malkin, who has repeatedly defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, allows her column to appear on a Web site, VDARE, that also publishes self-proclaimed “white nationalists.” VDARE’s parent organization has been branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Powers has not commented publicly on Malkin’s ties, and declined to comment on them to Salon, saying she didn’t want to discuss her colleagues.

I was once a supporter of Kirsten Powers, but thanks to her actions – and inaction – on Fox News as well as personal interaction I’ve had with her, it’s clear she’s on Team Stupid and we here at OliverWillis.com will subject her to the scorn she deserves.

ABC News reports that atheists are finding their voice. Yeah, you’d never know they represent 2% of the population judging from the play their nonstop carping gets in the media.

Now, people know that I’m no fan of Sam Harris or the particular brand of slash and burn atheism that he embodies. But just for giggles, I was curious on a random day like today how many mentions of Harris racked up next to mentions of a prominent right-wing Christian like Jerry Falwell in order to test Powers’ theory of atheism’s supposed advantage in the media.

“Sam Harris”: 181
“Jerry Falwell”: 781

Another Powers Failure.

>> Behold The Atheist Revolution
>> Kirsten Powers