You probably didn’t see Bill Clinton on Meet the Press Sunday. Given the number of televised sporting events to choose from — the Mets and the Jets and the Giants and the Yanks were all on TV, at the same time! — it was hard to fit him in. But for a president with a famously low opinion of reporters, he treated the all-too affable David Gregory mighty kindly.

Most journalists offer only slow pitches to ex-presidents (though they might start getting a little wary of Jimmy Carter) and the only real headline-maker here came when Gregory asked Clinton if the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary famously limned was still out there. “Oh, you bet,” Clinton replied. “Sure it is. It’s not as strong as it was, because America’s changed demographically, but it’s as virulent as it was. I mean, they’re saying things about him–you know, it’s like when they accused me of murder and all that stuff they did. He–but it’s not really good for the Republicans and the country, what’s going on now. I mean, they may be hurting President Obama. They can take his numbers down, they can run his opposition up. But fundamentally, he and his team have a positive agenda for America. Their agenda seems to be wanting him to fail, and that’s not a prescription for a good America.”

Pretty good answer, I thought; when he wasn’t obfuscating Clinton was always one of the best politicians in the US when it came to straightening bent facts. (He even made John Kerry’s famous avowal that he was for the Iraq war before he was against seem sensible.) And even if he managed to twist the knife a bit in the end, he has always understood that politics is a knife-fight.  What has been surprising since then is the reaction of some on the left. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, subbing for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown last night: “Mr. Clinton,” he said in reaction, “we have some 21^st century news for you here.  The vast right-wing propaganda machine is not shrinking; it is growing.”

Then, with the help of Crooks & Liars‘ Dave Neiwart he enumerated all the familiar evils out there: Rush, Beck, death panels, birthers. No doubt, a smoldering cauldron of BS is a-brewing. And you don’t have to look far to find it. But you don’t have to look far to find it refuted, either (hence Countdown, Rachel Maddow, Huff Post et al) — a more emboldened liberal counterpoint-machine than existed in Clinton’s time. And remember, this ex-president who generally chooses his words very carefully was talking about demographic change. The ground is moving under the right — where the people are and what colors they be —  and those shifts leave some on the right sounding slightly unhinged. He’s just saying they’re not as potent.

Clinton saw his administration grievously wounded (though not capsized) as much by his own foolishness as the VRWC. (And where do you put papers such as the NY Times in the spectrum of his enemies?) He knows the difference, I think, between a white whale and Whitewater, and he sees the tide a-changing…

Those of us opposed to the Atlantic Yards project were alarmed by the news this week that Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov was to acquire a majority stake in the New Jersey Nets — as well as the responsibility for moving the team to Brooklyn and pushing through Bruce Ratner’s benighted attempt to give us a score of skyscrapers we never asked for. Bad enough that members of the loyal opposition such as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn have always seen this as a David v. Goliath contest. Now we have an actual Goliath: the 6’7″ Prokhorov has designs on American basketball and about $10 billion to play with. 

In other parts of the country people paid less attention to this story; the big takeaway nationallywas “Russian guy buys US team.” This might have produced yowls of protest in the Cold War days, but when the Chinese own most of our debt and our baseball players are all Dominican, foreign influence seems relative.

Fortunately, the New York Times helpfully explains it all for us in a typically condescending editorial in today’s Week in Review. Moscow correspondent Clifford Levy first gives DDDB (of which I am a proud member) points for being “resourceful, tenacious and just plain ornery.” (“Get off my land, ya varmint!”) Then he establishes his bona fides by saying he now lives just blocks from Prokhorov’s office but used to live right near the site of the Nets proposed arena. 

That’s just to show he’s not biased as he lampoons “denizens of Brownstone Brooklyn” who “like to pad around in plastic clogs.” It is Mr. Levy’s unoriginal thesis that our once mighty borough — “land of Walt Whitman and other luminaries” —  could get some class back with an NBA arena. The development would, in his words, “accentuate its renaissance.”

I wish he still lived here; I would supply him with a map of the stars’ homes that he somehow missed when he lived here. Within a ten-minute walk of his old digs he could drop in on such modern luminaries as Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Wright, David Salle, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Egan and many more — nearly all of them opposed to this project. But Levy has already bagged his prey; he mocks a Park Slope public forum he attended in 2000 that debated the merits of Bush v. Nader, “as if the idea of even considering voting for George W. Bush was preposterous.” What were we thinking?!

Still, Levy thinks Prokhorov might have a hard time adapting to the idea of community resistance. He quotes Alec Brook-Krasny, a former Muscovite who now represents Brighton Beach in the state assembly on the difference between the two cultures. “Things are still done in a very simple way in Moscow,” he says. “Whoever is the main person in the neighborhood, the main official in the city, that person makes the decision. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s the final decision, and the community has no say.”

Crazy! Here we let three people — usually the mayor, the governor and whoever is running the legislature at the moment — make the decisions. And the community has no say here, either. This project was never put to a vote, the public hearings have been free-for-alls in which unions and others who stand to benefit financially have shouted down the opposition, and the city and the state have bent over backwards to make sure Ratner gets his way. Because here, as in Moscow, the guy with the most money wins. 

Sometimes with an assist from a journalist.

Did you dig Obama on Letterman last night? Most of today’s commentary focuses on the fact that he was serious after making with some jokes. (“I was actually black before I was elected” may have been scripted but it still played like a snap.) This after a Sunday full of talk show appearances – all in the same chair! — talking about health care reform, the economy, the wars…

Difference is the audience. The ratings for the Sunday talk shows are always actually rather low — but the demographics are primo! Well-to-do older viewers tune in (hence all the luxury car and financial management ads) and they have mostly made up their minds about those issues, or are at least paying attention. 

The average Letterman viewer is more, well, average. They tune in for some laughs, some celebrity sightings (and sometimes mishaps), some music. And the idea that this articulate, well-meaning man could actually convince a few of them to put down the bong or the beer or the cup of cocoa for a minute and actually grapple with the benefits of a better run health care system is quite moving to me, in a small d democratic way. We elected Obama — we did! — and most of us are still pulling for him. The fact that haters don’t like it can’t change the path we chose unless we let them. These are the same people who put an inept puppet and his evil henchman in the driver’s seat and looked the other way as he drove the country off a cliff. They had their chance. Now get out of the way. 

My favorite ad lib was actually Dave’s. After the president said that he let his daughters relax this summer he allowed that he didn’t have that option. “I couldn’t goof off all summer,” he said. 

“Others have,” said Letterman. 

‘nuf said.

What does it say about our nation that Time magazine has put Glenn Beck on the cover? Other bloggers have already weighed in on the sins of omission committed by the article’s author, David Von Drehle — most notably that 62 of Beck’s sponsors dropped his show after he called Obama a racist who hates white people (presumably his own mother and grandmother and nearly everyone in his administration). Or that the green jobs “czar” that Beck drummed out of office was responsible for the group that stoked the Beck boycott. Or that he was against our health care system before he was for it. 

Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and others have done a great job of holding Beck’s feet to the fire but there is a danger, I think, in treating it all as comedy. (Beck himself used to stand-up, and in a sense still does.) The importance of his importance is that he lies — consistently, and shamelessly — and now one of the prominent news weeklies in America has endorsed some of those lies. (The fact that the term “news weekly” in becoming as anachronistic as “books on tape” is another topic.) Truth matters, whether it be the president of Iran lying about the Holocaust or Beck lying about how many people showed up to protest Obama in Washington last week. 

The Park Service quit estimating the size of crowds in the Mall years ago, so tired were they of being pilloried by protestors of every political stripe for over or underestimating numbers, so the job falls to independent statisticians, who get quoted in liberal papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. They set the number at about 70,000 and Beck famously upped the ante to 1.7 million quoting as his source “the university of — I don’t remember.”

The university of I don’t remember! I think I went there. When you can pull numbers out of your ass and source someone who can’t be fact-checked, your well into the field of true demagoguery. And while we’re in the land of make believe, let’s talk about that “czar” thing for a moment: Czar has become, over the last few administrations, shorthand for any appointed administrator appointed and not vetted by congress or the public. (Bush had far more than Obama.) But Beck hates them in part because — they’re called czars! As in Russia. 

Forget about the fact that the Russian czar, or king, was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and their allies in 1917 and that the commies didn’t have any czars in their government. (Dictators, yes.) You are muddying the argument with facts again! Looking it up is beside the point. History books are as soiled as mainstream newspapers. The left has equally lamentable conspiracy theory nut-jobs — 9.11 anybody? — but so far they haven’t made the cover of Time magazine. Maybe it’s all just a desperate play for readers (the fact that you only see Time when you go to the dentist proves my assumption) but I worry that, in this case, the journal might be right about its pick. Welcome to Beckistan.

Face it, boomers: we’re starting to die off. And it ain’t just rockers who shot their hearts, minds and livers on earlier excesses. It’s more sober and seemingly steadfast fixtures like Mary Travers (72) and Henry Gibson (73), claimed by complications from chemo and cancer, respectively. 

Travers, the blonde sylph of Peter, Paul & Mary, got the bigger headline on the obituary page, and rightly so: She was what Debbie Harry was to punk music, the friendly and even seductive face (and voice) of folk music and by all accounts the real deal, a “Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and coffee houses that nourished the folk music revival,” William Grimes writes in the Times obit. 

Gibson was more like one of those cutouts standing behind the Beatles on the cover of Sgt Pepper, an unassuming figure whose parodic poems and halting delivery we used to imitate after Laugh-In. But I always think of him in Robert Altman’s movies, Nashville and especially The Long Goodbye. There he played the quack Dr. Verringer, who publicly humiliates the alcoholic writer Roger Wade (played to great effect by Sterling Hayden) in a cringe-inducing scene set at a beach party in Malibu (“Sign the check, Roger”).

Altman had a great talent for seeing what others didn’t in his actors; Gibson was known as a gentle flower child so the director cast him against type as villains, so his sweetness turned smarmy and even poisonous. And while it was difficult to imagine him as a country star, the nasty temperament behind his Nashville character’s upbeat patriotism resonates even today. 

As for the cancer, well it’s always something, as the lady said. Yesterday I heard Marianne Faithful singing Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” and was struck by this verse: “When we’re older and full of cancer/It doesn’t matter now, come on, get happy/’Cause nothing lasts forever/And I will always love you.” Nilsson died of heart failure (see rockers, above) while former junkie and Stones groupie Faithful keeps on ticking, miraculously. Go figure.