Friday, May 05, 2006

Stephen Colbert: Public Enemy #1 In The Bush White House

The problem is Dub, not Stephen Colbert! Impeach now, not later! If this is (fair & balanced) patriotism, so be it.

[x Salon]
The Fool and the Knave: Status-obsessed D.C. journalists tut-tutted at Stephen Colbert's irreverent performance — ignoring Bush's war against their profession.
By Sidney Blumenthal

The most scathing public critique of the Bush presidency and the complicity of a craven press corps yet was delivered at the annual black-tie White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night by a comedian. President Bush was reported afterward to be seething, while the press corps responded to the zingers with stone cold silence, playing the classic straight man. Subsequently, many news reports of the event airbrushed out the joker.

Stephen Colbert plays a crank conservative commentator in a parody on Comedy Central four nights a week. Performing his routine within 10 yards of Bush's hostile stare and before 2,600 members of the press and their celebrated guests, Colbert's offense of lèse-majesté affronted the amour-propre of the embedded audience. After his mock praise of Bush as a rock against reality, Colbert censured the press by flattering its misfeasance. "Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out ... Here's how it works: The president makes decisions. He's 'the decider.' The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!" (Silence)

Perhaps ironically, on the day after Colbert's performance, the New York Times published a front-page story on the latest phase of the administration's war on the press. Now Bush is weighing "the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws." Since the Washington Post exposed the existence of CIA "black site" prisons holding untold numbers of detainees without due process of law and the New York Times disclosed the president's order to the National Security Agency to engage in domestic surveillance without court warrants, the administration has applied new draconian methods to clamp down.

"Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?" reads the title of a lengthy article in the neoconservative journal Commentary, by senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, that lays out the case for prosecution. "What the New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism," he writes. When the Post and the Times won Pulitzer Prizes for their stories, William Bennett, a former Republican Cabinet secretary and now a commentator on CNN of the sort satirized by Colbert, declared, "What they did is worthy of jail."

At Bush's orders dragnets are being conducted throughout the national security bureaucracy in search of press sources. Government officials have been subjected to lie detector tests and interrogations. Within a week of the awarding of the Pulitzers, CIA analyst Mary McCarthy was fired for having had an "unauthorized" contact with a member of the press. At the same time, the FBI subpoenaed four decades of files accumulated by recently deceased investigative journalist Jack Anderson in an attempt to exhume old classified material.

Bush takes a different attitude on his own leaking of secrets for political purposes. Dozens of selective National Security Council documents were leaked to journalist Bob Woodward for his 2002 encomium, "Bush at War." Vice President Cheney and his staff leaked disinformation to reporters to make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And Bush and Cheney authorized Cheney's then chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD to sympathetic reporters in an effort to discredit a critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

In January, two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (the so-called Israel lobby) were indicted for receiving classified material from a Pentagon official who was later sentenced to prison. The AIPAC officials are being prosecuted as if they were reporters receiving leaks, and if they are convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act the precedent would be ominous for journalists. "Why should persons at the Times not be treated in the same manner?" writes Schoenfeld.

Some in the press understand the peril posed to the First Amendment by an imperial president trying to smother the constitutional system of checks and balances. For those of the Washington press corps who reproved a court jester for his irreverence, the game of status is apparently more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it's no laughing matter.

Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton. He is the author of the The Clinton Wars (2003), and other books, including The Permanent Campaign and The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. He is a columnist for the Guardian, Salon.com and OpenDemocracy.net , and a former staff writer for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the New Republic. He is currently senior fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security.

Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.


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The Matinee Idol Babbles On

Dub has bestowed the fratboy nickname of The Matinee Idol on The Rumster. A while back there was a dustup when a soldier nailed The Rumster during a Q&A with the troops in Iraq. The soldier asked The Rumster why troops had to pursue "hillbilly armor" for their military vehicles which were vulnerable (and still are) to IEDs. The Rumster babbled something about having "the army you have" rather than "the army you want." Sumbitch should have been shit-canned right then and there. But, noooooooooooo, Dub proclaims The Rumster to be the greatest Secretary of Defense ever. Now, The Rumster has been waylaid by a former CIA spook who nailed The Matinee Idol with his own words. If this is (fair & balanced) humiliation, so be it.

[x Salon]
War Room: A question for Rumsfeld: "Why did you lie?"
By Tim Grieve

Donald Rumsfeld was interrupted by protesters several times today as he tried to deliver a speech in Atlanta. The interruptions were brief, but then a critic, former CIA employee Ray McGovern, managed to engage the defense secretary in an extended question-and-answer session about the war. It was the kind of confrontation Rumsfeld seldom faces on the Sunday talk shows he frequents, and it left him, at one point, both stammering and speechless.

Think Progress has the video. Here's the transcript:

Question: So I would like to ask you to be upfront with the American people: Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kinds of casualties? Why?

Rumsfeld: Well, first of all, I haven't lied ... I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

Question: You said you knew where they were.

Rumsfeld: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and --

Question: You said you knew where they were: Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

Confronted with his own words -- McGovern was quoting from Rumsfeld's March 2003 appearance on ABC's "This Week," during which he said unequivocally that the United States knew where Saddam's WMD were -- Rumsfeld appeared flummoxed. He stammered, "My words -- my words were that --," and then it's unclear what happened next. CNN's camera remained focused on Rumsfeld rather than McGovern, but it appears from Rumsfeld's words that somebody tried to take away McGovern's microphone or remove him from the room. To his credit, Rumsfeld stopped whatever it was from happening.

Rumsfeld: No, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

Question: This is America.

Rumsfeld: You're getting plenty of play, sir.

Question: I'd just like an honest answer.

Rumsfeld: I'm giving it to you.

Question: Well we're talking about lies and your allegation there was bulletproof evidence of ties between al-Qaida and Iraq.

Rumsfeld: Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.

Question: Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That's also --

Rumsfeld: He was also in Baghdad.

Question: Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren't idiots. They know the story.

Rumsfeld: Let me give you an example. It's easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical-weapon-protective suits? Because they liked the style? They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously. He'd used them on his neighbor ... and they believed he had those weapons. We believed he had those weapons.

Question: That's what we call a non sequitur. It doesn't matter what the troops believe; it matters what you believe.

And with that, the moderator cut off McGovern's questioning, saying that he had to turn to other audience members with questions as a "courtesy" to all of them. Good thing, too, because you certainly wouldn't want to be "rude" in a situation like this.

"War Room" is Tim Grieve's daily blog in Salon.

Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.


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