They found a "high-ranking official" from "a previous Democratic administration" who thinks Bob is a bad choice, which allowed them to write that "even some Democrats" have "privately questioned" the appointment.

This is a photo caption: "Questions arise whether incoming White House counsel Bob Bauer's experience as a partisan warrior is appropriate for the position." The questions did not "arise" from the earth, unbidden. Nor were they torn from the thigh of Zeus. Politico reporters asked these questions, themselves.

But what's even better is who these questions arose to: the anonymous "high-ranking official" and Peter Wallison, the lawyer who most famously instructed Ronald Reagan to claim ignorance while testifying on Iran-Contra.*

Everyone else is like "well maybe he has done some stuff on campaign finance that I find personally distasteful but yes he is qualified." That's not gonna win the afternoon, guys.

The real tragedy here is that Politico went with "Bob Bauer Unqualified" instead of what will be the real scandal: he is an agent of ACORN!

*And then this happened:

The question, of course, came up...After a preliminary question about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and Regan's on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around the desk and said to Wallison, "Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?" Then he picked up the paper and began to read, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

HAH. A highly qualified quote-giver, this one.

Previously in "Politico Inventing And Then Reporting On Invented News" News:

Politico Reports on Story Politico Invented
Politico Begins Posting Fox News Slashfic
Scandal: Bill Before Congress Is Long, Complicated

[Photo: AP]

Plouffe was the author of the founding statement of anti-Politico-ism, as reported in a December New York Times Magazine story:

"If Politico and Halperin say we're winning, we're losing," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, "I saw someone on cable say this. . . ."

Oh how that lifted our hearts and gave us solace! We've often returned to it late at night when our thoughts are troubled by Tea Parties and death panels, and we fall asleep with the sounds of Plouffe's soothing, measured voice whispering in our ear that it's all going to be OK—that the shouting and the cynical, empty-headed analysis and the superficial horse race obsession and the bullshit stories all amount to little more than sound and fury. He proved that you can win by ignoring it.

But it's still a useful sound, and a pliant fury! Because Plouffe dropped one of the biggest "I saw someone on cable say this..." Drudge-bait stories of the primary into Politico's lap—he was responsible for saddling John Edwards with the $400 haircut story via a tip to Ben Smith:

Obama's campaign had a particularly capable opposition research shop, a source of tips to many reporters, not all of them on policy. And Plouffe, in passing, outs the campaign as the source of a brief item I did in April 2007 off an Edwards campaign expenditure — probably driving as much traffic, chatter and grief as anything that short I've ever written.

"We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did," Plouffe writes a bit self-servingly, "but there were times we indulged — it was our researchers who found John Edwards's infamous $400 hair cut expenditures."

So you can't win by ignoring Politico. You have to pretend to ignore them while you service them with material that makes your opponents look like the shallow self-obsessed divas that they are. There are no heroes.

The journalists, columnists, editors, and one blogger (also along for the ride was the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal, and Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) lunched with Obama, David Axelrod, Anita Dunn, Bill Burton, and Robert Gibbs. It was, of course, off the record, so stop emailing Gail about it already Maureen jeez!

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo brand new to the official White House press pool, so now Marshall gets to hang out with the grown-up journalists (and David Brooks).

We can all agree, as patriotic Americans, that the House of Representatives should only pass bills that name post offices after Ronald Reagan and honor country music's contributions to America.

What Congress should not do, ever, is try to vote on bills that are long.

Despite the badness of long bills full of evil Government words, every Congress passes thousand-page bills on transportation, energy, and education. No Child Left Behind was 1,033 pages long. The House Conference Report on the 2005 highway bill: 1,231. All of this is in the public record. You can download PDFs of any bill you like from the Library of Congress and Adobe Reader will tell you, right there at the top, how many pages of unreadable bureaucratese passed right by the Republican majority.

What is awesome here is that Politico is not simply playing into a meaningless Republican talking point, they are lovingly assisting in the creation of a meaningless Republican talking point.

Wouldn't it have been much more terrifying for conservatives if Nancy Pelosi's health care reform bill ended up being short? Like, it coulda been a four-page Jack Chick tract of jackbooted Americorps thugs throwing insurance company executives to the "death panels," which are grizzly bears, obviously.

Well, that will probably be their interpretation of local news. Because all the rest of it is poverty, development, crime, gentrification, and other stuff involving the poors and Black People and none of that shit Wins The Afternoon.

Anyway. Everyone is totally excited about this "hyperlocal" new Politico news thing. They hired Jim Brady, who used to run washingtonpost.com. He is a good hire. Jack Shafer thinks it will be a very good website that Politico invents, about the Redskins.

But only the local alt-weekly, the City Paper, notes that it will almost certainly lose a lot of money, like Politico does.

Because, come on, a staff of 50 people writing local news? For the internet? The people who read Politico do not care about local news. Maybe they care about some new fancy beer bar in Logan Circle, or something. But a website with a paid staff of three or four could pretty much take care of that.

Once this stupid thing launches and everyone talks about how it is a new and exciting model for local news or something, just remember that it will not be making any money, because Politico is a rich person's vanity project.

Another Conde Nast mag lines up for its 25% budget cuts: A tipster tells us that Teen Vogue had about six layoffs today in the sales and marketing departments, including, they say, a pregnant woman. We also hear rumors of editorial layoffs at Details today, although we have no...details. Know more? Email us.


Elsewhere in magazine layoffs: The long-awaited Forbes layoffs are coming down this week. Keith Kelly says 30 to 40 layoffs there this week. And WWD says that Time Inc. is "expected to make staff reductions across the board next week." That follows the 600 layoffs there one year ago. Damn.


What horrible things are going on at the San Francisco Chronicle? The paper lost more than 25% of its circulation in the latest report. Which is great news, according to the publisher! "Frank Vega, publisher of The Chronicle, said the newspaper's loss in circulation was an expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue." Ah yes: Now that your model relies on readers for revenue, you'd expect readers to flee from your paper in record numbers. Naturally. Also: "Starting next month, the paper will become the first in the country to use glossy, magazine-style paper in its daily editions, although not for every page." Um, just what the public's been waiting for? Even Romenesko is totally making fun of you, SF Chronicle.


Looks like Wonkette will be resuming its boycott of Politico, after discovering Politico is still way dumb.


There's a little war of words going on between "xenophobic" xenophobe Lou Dobbs and "self-important ass" Fox Biz mustache-haver John Stossel. Hopefully this will end with both men tearing each other limb from limb.

Friends and associates are encouraging Fox News chief Roger Ailes to jump into the political arena for real by running for president in 2012, top sources tell POLITICO.

"Ailes knows how to frame an issue better than anybody, and that's what we need now," says one Ailes friend who is encouraging the Fox founder, chairman and CEO to seek the Republican nomination to run against President Barack Obama.

This is of course a winking meta-joke, though it's not labeled as such. Roger Ailes is a personally loathsome fat man who literally has dozens of dead bodies in various closets around his various homes as a consequence of his 40-year career of killing people with television. The notion that he's considering a presidential run, or that any of his friends would urge him to consider one, exists exclusively in the mind of Mike Allen, who has confused the late-night "campaigns" he conducts in his bedroom with the help of a Roger Ailes doll and a Jon Stewart doll with reality.

But here's the joke: The White House's decision to delegitimize Fox News isn't intended to delegitimize Fox News. It is intended to elevate them into a political force, to fill the vacuum in the GOP leadership. By spinning a "White House v. Fox News" narrative, they've managed to temporarily supersede the "White House v. GOP" narrative, thereby making Fox News the de facto political opposition. Which is what both sides want: Fox News for money and viewers, and the White House because they like the idea of having an opposition that is noxious, untruthful, combative, angry, emotionally unstable, and subject to an unyielding financial incentive to be ever moreso. In that meta-world of jujitsu message wars—if you were trapped, Tron-like, inside Allen's foul mind—an Ailes candidacy makes perfect sense.

So let's put it on Politico and WIN THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD. Except Drudge hasn't linked to it yet, either because he thinks it's too clever by half or he's not done masturbating to it.

It is a Politico reporting on how a Republican Senator gave an anti-Obama speech based, he acknowledges, on a Politco story.

So Politico took a "dog bites man" story about a President fighting a political battle with political organizations, like the conservative Chamber of Commerce, and manufactured a controversy about the White House "working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican party", making it sound unprecedented and scandalous. (His weapons in this war? "Private meetings and public taunts." Back off, Conservatives, or the president will mock you again!) Then a Republican Senator wrote a speech based entirely on the premise of that manufactured Politico story, and Politico reported on that speech as important political news.

God bless their little hearts!

[Via Talking Points Memo.]

This kind of stuff cannot possibly look attractive to your theoretical disinterested observer, or "independent voter," to be literally cheering the fact that an American city—a Midwestern American city!—has lost something to a foreign city. This is like rooting for Obama's puppy to get run over. This is like if Obama said "My fellow Americans, it would be cool to see Drew Brees break the single-season passing yardage record this year" and then Michele Malkin went on the TV to pray for Bart Scott to break his leg this Sunday. (That's right, Malkin, I just compared you to a Jets fan.)

So hey, if you guys want to look like the most craven bunch of inconsistent assholes imaginable, that is your business! It does not hurt us any, for you jokers to go around shitting on America. But Politico, please, please, please stop trying to craft this "massive embarrassing Obama failure" thing into conventional wisdom. Please.

Obama never bothered to do anything about the Olympic bid until a week ago and the selection is entirely about the internal politics of the corrupt IOC—it has literally nothing to do with our own domestic politics, except that a bunch of assholes got all nutty about it, which is not news anymore.

Here is what they are getting at: Andrew Young was gay for John Edwards. Oh, god, he was so, so gay for John Edwards. Wow! Like, from the first paragraph onward:

When John Edwards returned to North Carolina in the course of his long quest for the presidency, Andrew Young always met him at the airport in Edwards's big black Chevy Tahoe. Young drove, and Edwards rode shotgun, silently raising his left hand whenever he wanted a Diet Coke, which Young would wordlessly supply.

Just a bro, out on a road trip, wordlessly providing another bro with some Diet Cokes. In paragraph two, Young is folding Edwards' dry cleaning.

What was Young's job description again?

Young sometimes described himself as Edwards's "special assistant" and dreamed of serving in an Edwards White House. Other aides, with a combination of disgust - and, perhaps, a bit of envy - referred to him as Edwards's "personal servant," or worse, Edwards's "butt boy."

Yes, well, we're beyond insinuation now, aren't we.

Here are some more sentences:

• Starting soon after Edwards was elected to the Senate in 1998, staffers began describing Young as intensely 'jealous' of others who were close to the senator.
• "It's not enough to say that he idolized the guy - there's something deeper and weirder than that."

Oh, and Elizabeth Edwards, what say you?

"In months of talking with [John Edwards], I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member," she wrote. She described an "obsessed" and "overbearing" young volunteer who "volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable," taking care of cars and dry cleaning - an unmistakable portrait, people close to her say, of Young.

This is not even halfway through this article, yet. As it goes on, we learn that Edwards did not reciprocate the passion, so much, but he was happy to "talk about sports" with Young, and even happier to allow Young to claim paternity of Rielle Hunter's child, forcing Hunter to move in with Young's family(!) and then they all had to move the West Coast for a while and then they went back to Chapel Hill. And John stopped taking Young's calls, and then Elizabeth started leaving nasty blog comments about him and leaving messages on Young's wife's voicemail demanding that Young reassert his paternity.

Oh, and then there is this:

And Young, with all the fury of a spurned lover, may be holding out yet another threat to his old idol, if it comes to that: an explicit videotape, two people who have seen it said, of Edwards and Hunter together.

Hah. Yes. Ok. Wheee! What a fucked-up bunch of people.

Someone give Ben Smith and Politico five thousand Pulitzers for this important investigative report into John Edwards' Waylon Smithers.

[Photo: AP]

Earlier this week, Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) went on MSNBC's Morning Joe and made some rather reasonable remarks about the racists who hate Obama: They exist, he said, and some of them go to town hall meetings. But not everyone who hates Obama is a racist.

But that was too much for the GOP, which seized on the comments and started sending the video around, saying, "Tom Perriello thinks we're all racists!" A "tipster" sent the video to Politico's Glenn Thrush, who found it "interesting" inasmuch as it was an opportunity to WIN THE DAY by talking about race all the time.

Here's what Thrush saw Perriello say when he played the video:

I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in my district in central and Southern Virginia, and the vast majority of them were civil; people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds. And there were the rare cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience; sometimes they weren't. Clearly, race remains a factor in America, but there's also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.

Since he's interested in reporting things that actually happened, Thrush dutifully sat down and took the five minutes or so required to transcribe Perriello's remarks—just kidding! No, of course he didn't. Instead, he just cut and pasted a "transcript" of Perriello's comments that he got via e-mail from a GOP hack, who had conveniently cut out the parts where Perriello said "the vast majority of [meetings] were civil," and "people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds," and the racist remarks were "rare."

He also copy and pasted the GOP hack's comment that Perriello is exactly like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi and cries race all the time and is a pointy-headed college boy: "Much like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi, Tom Perriello is mistaking genuine opposition to the president's agenda for bigotry. These insulting remarks are yet another indication that Perriello's Ivy-bred elitism is impeding his ability to represent everyday Virginians."

Apparently he got caught, because today Thrush posted an apology:

As I was transcribing, I got an email from a NRCC spokesman Andy Sere, who wanted to comment on it, appending what appeared to be a full a transcript of the exchange.

A time saver, I thought, so I cut-and-pasted. What I didn't immediately realize was that Sere had replaced key words — that provided important context —with elipses. When the error was pointed out, I quickly fixed it.

Anyway, lesson learned, right, everybody? The lesson being that Politico will take literally anything, so keep up the good work, Andy.

NOTE: This post has been edited to reflect the fact that we misspelled the hell out of Tom Perriello's name.

We learned yesterday, when they posted and quickly removed the leaked CNBC video of Barack Obama calling Kanye West a "jackass," that Politico endeavors to be "respectful" in its coverage of the D.C. media—that's the word managing editor Bill Nichols used to explain the spiking of the video. (He meant, we presume, that they want to keep their reporters getting booked on NBC News programs.) And today, we see a perfect example of that respectful coverage in the site's cheeky little version of the Emmys for pundits, wherein they strung together clips of some of the best practitioners of lowest-common-denominator punditry and asked readers to rank them by how "good" they are at it. The intro explains a lot:

Hollywood knows full well how to craft entertainment — and Sunday night's Emmy Awards will honor the best of the year. But here in Washington, the players know how to entertain and inform with that finest of all television genres: the political chat show. On Sundays, the hosts wake up painfully early to make news and analyze the passing scene. During the week, expert guests zip around town to studios where they pontificate at any given moment - and on any given topic.

The acknowledgment that entertainment is even on the agenda, let alone precedes "inform" in the Politico schematic, pretty much says it all. Of course it's accurate—cable news is entertainment, and Sunday hosts do want to be the ones "making news," rather than their guests. But that's very bad and wrong and they shouldn't be praised for it.

But in PoliticoWorld, our intrepid reporting class is judged not on its facility for rooting out falsehoods or illuminating issues of pressing public concern, but in categories like "Best Gets" and "Best Dynamics." Who's a best get nominee? Why, Barney Frank, of course, because he pulled out his earpiece and walked out during a CNBC interview. Now that is some fantastic TV talking. And why is New Gingrinch a "Best Get" nominee?

Although he hasn't held elective office in more than a decade, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) hasn't given up the power that goes with being a lawmaker.

That's right: People who say shit on TV that Politico writes about now have as much power as actual, sitting legislators who have been elected by their constituents. Because they are on TV.

And when it comes to good cable-news "dynamics," what do you think Politico looks for?

Conflict makes for good television drama. But not every commentator can bring the sizzle solo. Sometimes a producer needs to throw Feisty Pundit A into the mix so that Feisty Pundit B will let loose. A producer needs to look for some on-air chemistry - a little charm between two people who want to rip each other to shreds. And it's out there, all right.

That's actually not a bad summation of the indictment of everything that's wrong with cable-news culture. Now who do you think is best at it?

P.S. Politico media reporter Michael Calderone, who wrote up this "respectful" enterprise, is a good guy, but jesus.

How strange: Smith posted the video, which shows a smiling Obama surrounded by giggling aides as he makes clear that the remark was intended as off the record, at about 2 p.m. today. But within an hour or so, he took it down with this note by way of explanation:

UPDATE: Not so much: Wiser heads than mine at POLITICO made the call to take down the video of the "jackass" moment. Sorry about the tease if you missed it.

CNN didn't miss it. They grabbed the video and began airing it, complete with the Politico watermark.

Why would the heavies at Politico force Smith to take down a video that everyone wanted to see? Smith's commenters, as well as Business Insider and Mediaite, accused the site of "kissing up" to the White House, but that's unlikely given the fact that Politico's business model is based on enabling the ongoing—and now literal—demonization of the president. It's all very queer. We asked Smith for an explanation, and he responded, "You'd better ask those who made the call." He referred us to Politico's flack.

UPDATE: Smith has forwarded a response from Politico's managing editor, Bill Nichols:

We just felt upon reflection that it was more respectful to a fellow news-gathering operation to take it down. We had no complaints from ABC, CNBC, the White House or anyone else.

Nice to know that an online upstart like Politico has officially joined the Washington good ol' boy culture! And that they willfully acknowledge membership, apparently without realizing that it makes them look like snobbish insiders who would rather be in the good graces of their "fellow newsgathering operations" than publish shit that their audience cares about! Someone should tell their media reporter Michael Calderone, the guy they hired to report (respectfully?) on those fellow newsgathering operations.

While the disappearance of the video may have initially been a mystery, Smith's original take on its significance is not. As per standard Politico positioning, it was bracing blast of narrow-minded and defensive self-justification:

And here's that video, which shows, above all else, the president as a normal person — and moreover, a normal pol, utterly immersed in the cable-news frivolity he affects to disdain.

Affects to disdain? Barack Obama thinks something Kanye West did on TV makes him a jackass, ergo Barack Obama secretly loves everything on every cable channel and his sustained years-long critique of the mouth-breathing cable-news idiocy that Politico trades in is a lie and he really loves Ben Smith and he's just like everybody else and One of Us! One of Us! One of Us!

Why couldn't he take that sentence down, instead?

First: it is an obvious point, but there is no such thing as a "Czar," officially. The term is so vague that one could call almost any administration appointee a "Czar." In fact, it is so easy and misleading to generate controversy by just printing a catch-all list of federal government appointees with the ones you want to cause trouble about labeled "Czars" that we are not at all shocked that Politico did so.

Almost as if they had some sort of shame, they belatedly added bold and italics to those "Czars" who were confirmed or whose positions were created by Congress, thus making them not actually "Czars." (If you hold a long-established Cabinet position and have been confirmed by the US Senate only an outright propagandist determined to create controversy without any regard for honesty would call you a "Czar." Hello, Politico Staff! Nice list!)

In fact, on that Politico list there are only 15 people who weren't confirmed by the Senate and who hold positions created by the Obama administration. And they are all harmless.

But this list, this Pulitzer-worthy piece of investigative and made-up journalism, is decidedly incomplete. Why, the commenters at Free Republic came up with a dozen more "Czars" all on their own! Surely we can add more names to the list!

What about:

• Other Countries Czar: Hillary Clinton
• War Czar: Robert Gates
• Press Czar: Robert Gibbs
• Swear Czar: Rahm Emanuel
• Death Panel Czar: Zeke Emanuel
• Boom Boom Czar: Will.i.am
• Train Czar: Joe Biden
• Kill Whitey Czar: Michelle Obama
• Dog Czar: Bo

It's fun and easy to both take your cues from and feed the right-wing noise machine!

According to blogs, Sarah Palin and Todd Palin are getting divorced. But according to Sarah Palin, that is "made up." Whether she means "made up" like reports that the Alaska Independence Party supports secession were "made up" (i.e. "completely true") is unknown.

In a brief telephone interview on Tuesday night, Palin quipped that she loves finding out "what's goin' on in my life from the news."

"Do you want to talk to Todd?" she teased. "He's sitting right next to me." But he didn't come on the line.

Hmm, suspicious! Anyway, the internet odds makers say Sarah and Todd are through. But we won't be convinced until the Enquirer weighs in.

In more important breaking news: Sarah Palin ate at Michael's! Gosh, she sure does hate that lying liberal media, doesn't she? Always with the false gossip and internet rumors, also? Always not staying away from her kids? She hates the east coast elite MSM so much she dined at Michael's (the one time we went there we saw Katie Couric!) while in town to talk about her million-dollar book deal.

The New Republic's Gabriel Sherman has learned about Wolffe's proposal for 30 Days: A Portrait of the White House at Work, which would be an insider-y, behind the scenes account of the Obama White House. Wolffe, whose book Renegade, The Making of a President chronicled the Obama campaign, and his now-revealed proposal present an ethical dilemma for the White House. Would it be acceptable for them to grant special access to the presidency to a man working on behalf of corporate interests in his side gig?

In the proposal, Wolffe writes that he has personal relationships with Obama officials at "the highest level" who have already "expressed support informally" for the project. Wolffe envisions a fly-on-the-wall account of a month inside the White House, where he'll be "capturing group dynamics and people in action."

Meanwhile the White House claims that Wolffe has yet to "formally present" his plans:

"Mr. Wolffe has not formally presented the White House with a book proposal," a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to TNR this afternoon. "When and if he does we will evaluate it as we evaluate numerous others, taking account of all relevant factors."

And of course, Richard Wolffe doesn't see any problem with any of the things he's presently doing:

Wolffe doesn't see his corporate ties as a potential conflict. "The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on," he told Politico's Ben Smith in June. "You tell me where the line is between business and journalism."

Sherman goes on to detail an interesting encounter between Wolffe and Ben Smith that took place in an airport lounge after Wolffe read something critical Smith had written about him, a story that only adds to the avalanche of unflattering information to come out about Wolffe in the last few days.

What a sad, strange place Alaska is. The "Governor's Picnic," where Palin handed the reigns to Sean Parnell, takes place at Pioneer Park, which the locals still know as "Alaskaland" because it is in fact a theme park featuring a genuine steamboat, the railroad car that President Warren G. Harding rode in while touring Alaska in the 1920s, a carousel, and a mini-gold course. RV parking is $9 a day.

An Anchorage Press reporter milled about Alaskaland as Palin launched/ended her political career Sunday, interviewing local pols, reporters, and a guy who runs Santa's Candles and Gifts ("[Parnell is] down to earth people, just like Sarah.... [H]e will get the job done, and I think she's right in turning it over to him.")

The Politico's Jonathan Martin was there. He didn't think Alaska had summers.

Squinting in the sun, with an unnecessary fleece jacket tied around his waist, Martin says he's struck by the number of tourists who happened to be in Alaska and took time out of their vacations to attend one of the three Governor's Picnics leading up to the transfer of power.

The Associated Press sent a reporter from the D.C. bureau, who for some reason felt compelled to explain the organization's decision to cover Palin:

The Associated Press's Washington D.C. bureau has sent up Matthew Daly to cover the transfer of power. "We're not tired of the story at all," he says of Palin. "We think she's someone who has a lot of followers and want to know what she's doing. She represents a large constituency of the Republican Party, and also of all types-there are independents and Democrats that support her, and also she obviously has people who oppose her.

No one is tired of this story.

VandHei and Harris are nauseatingly self-satisfied people and must be tyrants to work for. They dazzled Rose with talk about how newspapers are dying but Politico makes money and deserves a Pulitzer Prize. Allbritton actually said that.

Also: VandeHei respects POWER and FEAR and claims—literally—that every member of Congress reads Politico OBSESSIVELY, and Harris talks about how avant garde it was of him to hire an untested Ben Smith from the pissant New York Observer and doesn't seem to know that he actually hired Smith from the New York Daily News, which is the sixth-most widely read newspaper in the Unites States. Nice work turning a nobody loser bum like him into a WINNER.

Then, after bragging ad nauseum about how Politico goes DEEP and is IMMEDIATE and OWNS things and devotes more resources to the White House than any other news organization, VandeHei admits that the one thing he'd really like to know the answer to is "how does it really work" in the White House. Seriously.

[Via The Plank.]