Replies to post #3047 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[bulldzr]

Rooster and Zitboy, Sirs, I respectfully suggest that you both re-read this article posted by F6. Please try to read it with an open mind. This commentary is not from one of your so-called left-wing liberals in the press Zit. This is from just a plain old journalist, one with 40 years covering Presidents, not some dilletant right wing talk show ranter with an agenda.

"...These days, as the reigning octogenarian queen of the D.C. press corps, she's free to speak her mind – and her take on White House journalism, and on the administration it now covers, is scathing.

"We've always been manipulated and managed, back to when I began with Kennedy and certainly before, but never to this extent ... The secrecy in this administration has reached the highest levels. That's never been seen before. Everybody has to be on board with this president. Nobody plays devil's advocate ... There is no search for answers in this President."

The result of all that secrecy, says Thomas, isn't just a lack of information for journalists – it's lack of accountability to the public.

"We are truly, truly being denied the information we should have. 9-11 gave it greater impetus. 9-11 instilled in everyone that we have to be patriotic.

"You get out of that by demanding answers: What is terrorism? What is terror? Why did the President try to kill two investigations of 9-11?... If you can't get to the root of a problem, how can you solve it? There aren't enough guns in the world to kill hatred.

"How can you want to be a war president? No past president, not even Eisenhower, wanted to be known as a war president."

Bush has held fewer news conferences than any other modern-day president, but, Thomas says, even his administration's twice-daily White House press briefings have become politicized.

"He won't call on me, and I'm in the back row now so I'm ignored ... They don't like my questions. That's okay, just so somebody asks them, but they just don't want me to ask questions ... If I was a favored columnist, I'm sure I'd be in the front row again. But I have the prerogative of asking the questions, I do try. "I do think all of us [in the press] have laid down on the job early on [after 9-11]. Some of us are coming out of a coma. But nobody's being challenging enough. We are adversarial, we aren't there to worship at anybody's shrine. We're there for accountability."

Thomas also bemoans the trends in journalism that abet non-accountability: the emphasis on entertainment and noise, the talk shows where hosts and guests dish out opinions without ever giving audiences the unvarnished facts.

"People think talk show [hosts] are journalists, but they're not," Thomas scoffs. "They're getting just plain opinion. I think people are much better served when we get a straight news story, even though I'm a columnist now. My opinion isn't worth anything.

"I wrote for 57 years for UPI. I was never accused of slant. I wrote dull copy."

In many ways, Helen Thomas represents a vanishing breed: from the mythic Murrow era of journalism, when working-class reporters placed their responsibility for getting the full story to the public above all. These days, national TV news anchors perform (and are paid) like rock stars, politicians lie and pander shamelessly to feed the media beast's appetite for sensation – and Thomas has become a celebrity herself. She's become one, ironically, because she's a visible symbol of what's been lost in celebrity journalism: a desire for the information necessary for citizens to make informed choices in a democracy."

[easymoney101]

This Isn't America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last week an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin said, "This isn't America; the government did not invent intelligence material nor exaggerate the description of the threat to justify their attack."

So even in Israel, George Bush's America has become a byword for deception and abuse of power. And the administration's reaction to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" provides more evidence of something rotten in the state of our government.

The truth is that among experts, what Mr. Clarke says about Mr. Bush's terrorism policy isn't controversial. The facts that terrorism was placed on the back burner before 9/11 and that Mr. Bush blamed Iraq despite the lack of evidence are confirmed by many sources — including "Bush at War," by Bob Woodward.

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/opinion/30KRUG.html