Blogging Made Easy
Don't Know Much About History
An editorial on the Supreme Court in the ultraliberal Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette includes this howler:Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower--then transformed America with profound rulings long sought by Democrats, such as abolition of school segregation.
Long sought by Democrats? Although Harry S. Truman pursued some pro-civil rights policies, the Democrats remained the party of segregation until well into the 1960s. The Senate Web site reminds us who it was who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
At 9:51 on the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert C. Byrd completed an address that he had begun fourteen hours and thirteen minutes earlier. The subject was the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that occupied the Senate for fifty-seven working days, including six Saturdays.
Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klansman, arrived in Congress in 1953, the same year Warren became chief justice. Now 87, he still serves in the Senate, where he represents West Virginia, home of the Charleston Gazette. That makes the Gazette's error, or attempt to rewrite history, all the more risible.
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(Example 2...(on Rove) What the MSM SAYS)
(From Binghampton NY Press-Sun:)
"The president should follow through with his promise to fire the leakers. "
(From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:)
"For the past two years the White House has denied any involvement by Rove, and the president promised that he would fire anyone in his administration who leaked classified information."
(What the President ACTUALLY Said... and comments) (From Hugh Hewitt 7/13)
Posted at 5:30 PM, Pacific
Journalism 101 --What some reporters ought to be asking members of the White House press corps.
President Bush, on 9/30/2003:
"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. If the person has violated law, then the person will be taken care of."
"It's a tough legal hurdle for Patrick Fitzgerald, the special federal prosecutor who has been investigating the Plame case for more than 18 months.
"He has to find somebody who would say Rove knew that she was covert, that he knew that the government was making an effort to hide her identity,' said Philip Heymann, former deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration. 'It would appear he is working very, very hard to prove that because without it, you don't have a crime.'"
Mr. Heyman doesn't know what the prosecutor is "working very, very hard to prove," but it is clear to most reasonable people that Matt Cooper's e-mail does not support even a far-fetched claim that Rove broke the law.
But don't believe me. Believe the 36 "major news organizations and reporters' groups" that filed an amici curiae brief in the D.C. Circuit on the question of whether Matt Cooper and Judith Miller should be compelled to reveal the identities of confidential sources. (HT: Beldar).On page ii of the brief, the lawyers for the media groups assert: "In this case, there exists ample evidence in the public record to cast serious doubt as to whether a crime has even been committed under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (the "Act") in the investigation underlying the attempts to secure testimony from Miller and Cooper. If in fact no crime under the Act has been committed, then any need to compel Miller and Cooper to reveal their confidential sources should evaporate." Among the amici --ABC, employer of one Terry Moran, outraged member of the White House press corps, CNN, CBS, FoxNews, and NBC Universal --employer of David Gregory, another of the "hang Rove" crowd. The Washington Post and White House Correspondents are also signatories to the brief that notes "Plame was not given 'deep cover' required of a covert agent...She worked at a desk job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen traveling to and from, and active at, Langley. She had been residing in Washington -- not stationed abroad-- for a number of years. As discussed below, the CIA failed to take even its usual steps to prevent publication of her name."
The brief also notes that "an article in the Washington Times indicated that Plame's identity was compromised twice prior to Novak's publication. If this information is accurate --another fact a court should explore-- there is an absolute defense to prosecution."
So the collective braying in the press room seems at best peculiar. Rove answered a Cooper call, and did not name Plame. The White House reporters are calling for Rove's head based on what, exactly? The president's statement on September 30, 2003? On a crime their own news organizations doubt has occurred in any event, much less a crime committed by Karl Rove?
David Gregory, NBC empty suit, snarled this at Scott McClellan today:
"To make a general observation here, in a previous Administration if a press secretary had given the sort of answers you have just given in referring to the fact that "everybody who works here enjoys the confidence of the president," Republicans would have hammered them as having a kind of legalistic and sleazy defense. I mean the reality is that you are parsing words, and you have been doing it for few days now. So did the president think that Karl Rove did something wrong or doesn't he?...Even if it wasn't a crime? You know, there are those who believe that even if Karl Rove was trying to debunk bogus information, as Ken Mehlman suggested yesterday, perhaps speaking on behalf of the White House, that when you are dealing with a covert operative, that a senior official of a government should be darn well sure that that person is not undercover, is not covert, before speaking about them in any way shape or form. Does the president agree with that or not?"
Gregory might want to read pages 9 through 12 of his network's lawyers' brief before asserting that Plame was a "covert operative": "There are sufficient facts on the public record that cast considerable doubt as to whether the CIA took the necessary 'affirmative measures' to conceal Plame's identity. Indeed, these facts establish such sloppy tradecraft that, at a minimum, the CIA was indifferent to the compromise of her identity...Did no one at Langley think that Plame's identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her subject matter expertise?...Moreover, given Novak's suggestion of CIA incompetence plus the resulting public uproar over Plame's identity being revealed , the CIA had every incentive to dissemble by claiming it was 'shocked, shocked' that leaking was going on, and thus made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate."
How ironic that NBC's lawyers mock the "shocked shocked" pose of the CIA, but that Gregory assumes the same pose from his perch in the White House press room with cameras rolling.
One more note: Gregory argues that Republicans would have been outraged by McClellan-like "parsing" in a previous Administration. Note that he doesn't say "we" would have been outraged, or that "the White House press corps of that era" would have been outraged. He says "Republicans." So the press of today is as partisan as the Republicans of the Clinton era.
On that we can agree.
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(Example 3... Rathergate) Take your pick...
(Example 4 Maureen Dowd)
posted by Laer at 9:42 AM
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