Your .02
Your guest is the expert, not me. But really, the location of Helen Thomas' chair is now the standard by which the "muzzling" of the press is judged? And Rathergate too? Not to mention other "darker and nefarious" facts our reporter cannot bear to mention, and an Inside Baseball referance to Fox News? Forgive me if I find our reporter's case somewhat underwhelming.
If a William F. Buckely type tried to pass this type of thing off as evidence you'd be on him like a cat. Come on, Rob, you bill yourself as an independent minded type with no allegience to the Left or the Right, why are you pulling your punches here?
I think the situation's different. This wasn't an interview in the sense of repartee. Initially, I asked her (I think) if she wanted to comment on what it was like to report inside the Beltway. She asked me if I was interviewing her. I said no, but if she wouldn't mind, I'd be happy to. She then asked me to send her questions. After soliciting them (and getting two) from readers, I added my own three (2-4) and she answered them. I then posted the questions with her answers.
What I'm getting at is that I posted my questions and her answers in the same way that I did for the other reporters who commented on recent issues as well as on Jeff Gannon. In none of those posts did I (and feel free to look and find where I did, b/c I may be wrong but life is too short for me to reread all that) criticize or analyze what the reporter said. I just quoted it in full, figuring that the peanut gallery would have plenty to say. In this instance, would I have liked to've asked follow-up questions? Yes, but I was under the impression that she was too pressed for time to afford me that luxury.
But as for what she said, I don't see your problem with it. She wasn't making a case point by point to convince you; she was giving her opinion, and that is usually casual. (If you want to criticize me for being hard on Buckley in light of that, then go ahead.) LA said that moving Helen Thomas to the back of the room was "on the most benign level" of "muzzling." If you don't think that's what it is, that it's getting a vocal administration critic out of camera range, then I don't know what to say to you. As for Rather, we all know Mapes shouldn't have put the memo in the story without finishing the vetting process. But that memo came from somewhere, and so far it's looking more and more like it was bait. And Newsweek? They screwed up, but the essence of the report, just like the Rather report, was true. The Quran was abused; Bush skipped out on the TANG. Never mind the wheelbarrowfuls of bullshit the administration shovels daily (par for the course in politics, but these guys make Clinton look truthful). LA reserved most of her criticism for the fourth estate itself. You don't have to work hard to muzzle a self-loathing nat'l news media that muzzles itself.
Plus, and you've probably realized this, inviting someone to dinner and then beating them up makes it unlikely that they will return.
I think your last point might be the most salient of all.
That said, it just seems that a lot of the griping from the Left is analagous to complaints about the Patriot Act: everybody thinks the world is coming to an end because of it, but when pressed for details, the response is silence or a stringing together of inferences and impugning of motives that lead to a big nothing.
I call this the Left's Spandau Complex: I just am tired of being told (sometimes expressly, most of the time implicitly)that I am living in Spandau but am not smart enough to know it.
You're a Nazi war criminal?
Rob,
PDS has excellent points. It is quite telling that Newsweek and Rather continue to assert the "fake but accurate" defense. They should be above this.
Moving Helen Thomas to the back of the room benefitted one person more than anyone else: Helen Thomas. The woman has become a crack pot that was embarrasing herself on almost a daily basis. Now, with some luck, her legacy will remain somewhat untarnished.
By that logic, we should move the President, his cabinet and his Official Press Liar, Scott McClellan, to the back of the room as well. What Bush's father called "the crazies in the basement" during his tenure are now in charge of the country, and they are not "conservative."
I haven't seen Newsweek assert any such defense, though they may have. Yes, they published a story without sufficient confirmation from a theretofore reliable source who then retracted his claim about which document he saw the flushing cited in. But as AP, Reuters and the ICRC and even now the Pentagon have shown, Qurans were frequently mistreated. Do you care about that at all? Do you care about the Bush administration ruining the reputation of the United States in the eyes of those he purportedly wants to bring democracy to, thus fueling the jihad? Do you care that Iraq and now Afghanistan are reportedly going to hell, according not to reporters but to military experts? (You missed the military sources cited in "The Mystery of the Insurgency" and missed the fact that al-Zarqawi is only a part of the insurgency.)
As for Rather, again, I think you missed the point--or maybe you're indifferent to the central issue. Rather and Mapes screwed up. But the commander's secretary claimed to've written memos like the one Mapes shouldn't have put in the story, and others testified that the commander's attitude toward Bush was accurately portrayed. You must really like red herring to eat it so often.
PDS makes a point, yes. It's more like a gripe, though, a venting of frustration over some people he thinks aren't backing up their claims, which is a valid complaint (I don't know who he's talking about). I have heard plenty of hyperbole about all sorts of Bush programs, but the Patriot Act is generally criticized not for what the FBI and others are using it for right now but for what they could legally do in the future based on what it says. That, I think, is very legitimate. The Patriot Act has some ominous implications for all of us. Unless you trust the government to never get the wrong man.
Do I care about Quaran abuse? No.
Did Newsweek assert such a defense? In my view, yes, but I can agree this is open to interpretation. For example your statements on Newsweek and Rather above essentially assert such a defense.
Did I miss the military sources in the "Mystery of the Insurgency"? No, go back and read what I wrote again. I acknowledged those sources but also pointed out that they did not really support the "mystery" theory.
Are Afghanistan and Iraq going to hell? No, this happened around the middle part of the last century.
Did Bush Jr. ruin the reputation of the U.S. in the eyes of those he is trying to save. No. Many are quite confident that things are better, and most already hated us anyway.
I may be eating red herring, but you, my friend are consuming something that is creating an almost inhuman amount of bile. Perhaps it's Micheal Moore's excrement?
Rob,
Excellent job on these interviews.
To those who don't believe that the Bush administration's tactics of muzzling the press have any effect, watch Bush in a press conference. By the way, in and of itself, the extreme lack of press conferences by Bush himself is another way the press is muzzled. But as I was saying, watch Bush as he clumsily studies the seating chart in a press conference for the next person he's going to call upon. He's clearly looking to see who, and in which chair, he's going to call upon. Often, he doesn't even look up at the group when he calls out a name. When he does look up, it's because he's calling on someone he's given one of those chummy little nicknames because he knows those are the people who pitch softball questions, and so they've made it into that inner circle of people with pet names.
Helen Thomas? When was the last time she got to ask a question? And, to the fellow who said she was embarrassing herself - there should be nothing embarrassing about asking a tough, pointed question, at the man who has the most control over the fate of millions of people's lives, or at other members of his administration. He (they) ought to be able to handle the tough questions.
Embarrassing are the pandering lapdogs in the audience who are so afraid of being muzzled that they don't attempt to challenge the administration.
Worse still are those among us who have become so sedated by the "professionalism" of the press that we don't even recognize anymore what a tough question sounds like.
Helen Thomas has, throughout her career, caused consternation by asking sharp questions. But never before the Bush administration was she so disrespected. She was always given the first question at press conferences. With Bush, no more. In fact, in the press conference before the invasion of Iraq, Bush didn't give her a single opportunity to ask a question - I presume, for fear she would ask the one question that would cause the whole terrible house of cards of gussied up intelligence to fall.
Indeed, press conferences aren't so much to share new information, but to demonstrate the will of the White House to carry out an action. They are political theater. A tough question might embarrass Bush - and as we all saw in the Bush-Kerry debates, he's easy to set off balance.
As a measure of her esteem - and ironically, of the comparison that can be drawn between Bush and other less-free societies, Thomas related this story in an episode of Now:
Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today had an interview with Fidel Castro a couple of years ago. And he asked Castro, "Now, what's the difference between your democracy and ours?" And Castro said, "I don't have to answer questions from Helen Thomas." Which I considered the height of flattery.
Schroeder:
Thanks, and thanks for the Helen Thomas reflection (and "your democracy and ours"? Neuharth's quite the kiss-up). She used to make me roll my eyes sometimes, but now I'd give anything for her to come back. God knows, they need somebody to stir up shit in that room, if only to keep everyone from falling asleep. In fact, I think we need a machine that just throws back old Bush and McClellan quotes at Scott M., to show how often he contradicts himself. Like today, when he tied himself in knots over Newsweek.
Pursuit:
Do I care about Quaran abuse? No.
Figures. Why would you care about inflaming passions among Muslims? Do you wear glasses for your myopia?
Did Newsweek assert such a defense? In my view, yes, but I can agree this is open to interpretation. For example your statements on Newsweek and Rather above essentially assert such a defense.
My statements did not "essentially assert such a defense." I "essentially" said that those stories, while valid stories in themselves, were diversions from the much bigger stories that were their subjects, which got buried as a result of Rather and Newsweek's mistakes (in Newsweek's case, their bad luck with a source, too). That's not a defense of Rather or Newsweek. Saying so is using what Powerline passes for "logic."
Did I miss the military sources in the "Mystery of the Insurgency"? No, go back and read what I wrote again. I acknowledged those sources but also pointed out that they did not really support the "mystery" theory.
That's odd, because according to the article,
Steven Metz, of the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out. Yet, he said, "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like any kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging. It really is a nihilistic insurgency."Too bad he was too stupid to realize that calling it "terrorism" solved the mystery. After all, Fateh and Hamas and the Martyrs' Brigade are just "terrorists," right? They're not also "insurgents."
He warned that this hydra-headed quality could make the insurgents hard to crush, even as the lack of unity makes it unlikely they will rule Iraq. "It makes it harder to eradicate the insurgency, but it also makes it more difficult for insurgents to gain their ultimate objective - if that is to control the country," he said.
That no one knows if that is the objective is, by historical standards, one of several remarkable, perplexing features of this fight.
A clear cause - one with broad support - is usually taken for granted by experts as a prerequisite for successful insurgency.
But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle. Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role.
This incoherence is something new. "If you look at 20th-century insurgencies, they all tend to be fairly coherent in terms of their ideology," Dr. Metz said. "Most of the serious insurgencies, you could sit down and say, 'Here's what they want.' "
But feeling "intellectually superior" to the reporter, as you claimed, you probably didn't deign to read that part. Or maybe all that registered was "foreign fighters"--why you mentioned only al-Zarqawi in your post.
Are Afghanistan and Iraq going to hell? No, this happened around the middle part of the last century.
Afghanistan:
DEFENCE chiefs are planning to rush thousands of British troops to Afghanistan in a bid to stop the country sliding towards civil war, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.
Ministers have been warned they face a "complete strategic failure" of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan and that 5,500 extra troops will be needed within months if the situation continues to deteriorate.
An explosive cocktail of feuding tribal warlords, insurgents, the remnants of the Taliban, and under-performing Afghan institutions has left the fledgling democracy on the verge of disintegration, according to analysts and senior officers.
The looming crisis in Afghanistan is a serious setback for the US-led 'War on Terror' and its bid to promote western democratic values around the world.
Defence analysts say UK forces are already so over-stretched that any operation to restore order in Afghanistan can only succeed if substantial numbers of troops are redeployed from Iraq, itself in the grip of insurgency.
Iraq:
An unchastened insurgency sowed devastation across Iraq Wednesday as experts here said the country is either on the verge of civil war or already in the middle of it.
...
"It's just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We've been in a civil war for a long time," said Pat Lang, the former top Middle East intelligence official at the Pentagon.
Other experts said Iraq is on the verge of a full-scale civil war with civilians on both sides being slaughtered. Incidents in the past two weeks south of Baghdad, with apparently retaliatory killings of Sunni and Shia civilians, point in that direction, they say.
...
"I think we are really on the edge" of all-out civil war, said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who worked for the U.S. coalition in Iraq.
...
"Everything we thought we knew about the insurgency obviously is flawed," said Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was quiet for a little while, and here it is back full force all over the country, and that is very dark news."
Did Bush Jr. ruin the reputation of the U.S. in the eyes of those he is trying to save. No. Many are quite confident that things are better, and most already hated us anyway.Right. Hated us after we invaded Iraq. World opinion of America tanked
(cont.)
World opinion of America tanked over Iraq, in case you hadn't heard.
By "better," I assume you mean "far more dangerous, with regular power outtages, high unemployment and insufficent drinking water." Better in some respects, worse in others. Hopefully, Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually flourish. But right now they aren't flourishing.
I may be eating red herring, but you, my friend are consuming something that is creating an almost inhuman amount of bile. Perhaps it's Micheal Moore's excrement?
I do not take words like that kindly. And not because I oppose coprophagia (though it's pretty gross). Nevertheless, I'm going to hold my tongue. I will not do it again.
Rob,
Sorry if you don't take words like that kindly, but as a wiseman with a website once told me, "don't be surprised if you poke a beehive and then get stung."
Regarding the Patriot Act:
About two years ago a librarian I know attended a session at an ALA conference. As you probably know, the Patriot Act forbids librarians to reveal if the FBI examines their records. To get around that, the speaker asked everyone in the rather large group to raise a hand if his or her library had NOT been visited the FBI.
No one raised a hand. Not one. There were audible gasps.
This was, of course, right at the time when Ashcroft was claiming that the Patriot Act had not been used to examine library records. After being pressed, he finally admitted that it had, though if I recall, he claimed this had only happened a handful of times.
LNS: you have, unintentionally I believe, proven my exact point. Now, in addition to the precise placement of Helen Thomas' arse in the seating arrangment of what Rob calls the Washington Press Corpse, we have hearsay about a bunch of librarians unwilling to raise their hands as evidence of The Spandau Complex. Amazing. What will happen next? Will unknown agents of the BTA confiscate their reading glasses?
Does anybody want to get worked up about actual violations of the Constitution, include those which involving free speech? Forget Helen Thomas and a hypothetical gang of librarians and take a look at the Supreme Court's decision upholding what we now are taught believe was "campaign finance reform." This law prohibits political speech within 30 and 60 days of elections. See if you can square this with the First Amendment, which states, rather elegantly, "Congress shall make no law ...abridging freedom of speech..."
I realize this is not very sexy because it does not involve alleged sinister motives on the part of "BushCo" or anything dramatic like that; it merely involves our 3 branches of government blessing restrictions on political speech. One could even call this the government "muzzling" free speech.
Well done PDS.
Beyond the constitutional issues of "campaign finance reform", we can also include the radicalization of our political discourse. The Democratic Party is an excellent example in their increasing reliance on organizations such as MoveOn and other 524s (or is it 527s, I forget). Interestingly a vast majority this type of Demo funding came from only 5 people. Perhaps we could call them the chosen few. Talk about a muzzeling of free speech, does anything compare?
All of you who are interested in the actual subject of the post, please feel free to return this thread to it. If Ms. Alexandrovna is reading this, she'd probably appreciate that, just as I'm sure she'd appreciate the courtesy that some commenters seem to lack.
PDS,
I also have issues with those aspects of campaign finance reform you mention, though my solutions are likely different from yours.
My mention of the Patriot Act in regard to libraries was a direct response to your statements that basically the whole thing amounted to nothing. While my story is, as you say, hearsay (but not hypothetical), I still find it disturbing. Either all of these evil librarians are making it up, or terrorists are swarming over libraries all across the country, or the FBI is using its new powers for a lot more than just searching for terrorists. And we aren't really going to know the answer, are we, since it's illegal for libraries to say anything. Maybe when the FBI can come rifle through your drawers as they please you'll be a little more disturbed (and they're just a Congressional vote away from doing that, without a warrant).
Going back to the main topic, I agree that the placement of Helen Thomas in the press room is not very significant (though why Ronald Reagan was man enough to deal with her on the front row, and Dubya is not, is an interesting question). I also think the reporter acknowledges that. And it's also a tiny portion of the reporter's response. Is she describing a state-controlled media, as in the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states? No. Is she describing clever manipulation by the state of lazy and often dumb reporters who are more concerned about pleasing their corporate bosses than actually performing their jobs as reporters? That sounds more like it to me.
Did it ever occur to you guys that you're exaggerating the problem? Perhaps things just aren't as bad as you seem to think.
I'll go put on the asbestos underwear now.
Did it ever occur to you that you're doing the opposite?
BTW, I never said anything to you that went as far as what you said to me.
Rob,
Come on. You routinely come to my site and call me remarkably uniformed, and ignorant, among other things. Over at Hammer and Nail you said, "When in doubt, please remember that I favor your freedom to believe whatever lickspittle hogwash you choose, and from what I’ve seen, it’s washing down your chin".
Now I hold out the possibility that consuming excrement is a step more distateful than consuming "lickspittle", but I think we can agree that it is fairly fine line.
As I said before, I do not find our exchange of little insults offensive, as long as we also manage to have some substance to our correspondence. For the most part, I think we have accomplished that. However, perhaps it would be better if we just stuck to the facts. Let me know.
In either case, if I have upset you I apologize. My intent was only to stir the pot, and pehaps get LNS to spring up in one of his (her?) spirited, and to me amusing, defenses of you
Your Pal,
Pusuit
That would be,
Your Pal,
Pursuit.
I don't know who the other guy is.
Yeah, okay. We just disagree about the thickness of that line.
Hello, Joe McCarthy
tunica casino hotel tunica casino hotel tunica casino hotel // gambling and casinos gambling and casinos gambling and casinos
Commenting by HaloScan
