The Obama administration's clumsy and petty attempt to step on the Republican debate (subsequently short-circuited by Speaker Boehner) made no sense. First, America has pretty much tuned out the president's tiresome speeches. Second, the controversy would (and still will) probably wind up increasing ratings for the probably boring GOP face-off, which most TV viewers would have otherwise ignored. Of course, a president can command the airwaves anytime he wants by delivering a speech from the Oval Office, Martha's Vineyard, or anywhere else. In a matter of extreme urgency, why wait until Congress is back in session? As New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin writes, "It's not a jobs plan; it's a political photo-op."
That being said, one wonders how many presidential teleprompters will be necessary for an address to a joint session of Congress. The Washington Examiner reports that the president "required two heavy-duty teleprompters on Monday during a three-minute speech in which he nominated Alan Krueger to serve as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers."
When it comes to national security, the state of the union is not strong. A failed presidency (one that even requires a teleprompter for a visit to a sixth grade class) is one thing; a failed presidency that jeopardizes the safety and security of the American people is quite another.
In a 19-page report card being published Tuesday, the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism gives the Obama administration an "F" for failing to take key steps the commission outlined just over a year ago in its initial report.
A bipartisan, independent commission on stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction says that the Obama administration has failed in its first year in office to do enough to prevent a germ weapons attack on America or to respond quickly and effectively should such an attack occur.
n a 19-page report card being published Tuesday, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism, chaired by former Senators Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida, and Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican, gives the new administration the grade of "F" for failing to take key steps the commission outlined just over a year ago in its initial report.
As we've repeatedly asked in other contexts, how will this latest policy decision--to try KSM and his colleagues in civilian court--help make the U.S. more safe and secure? Insuring domestic tranquility is one of the key principles of the U.S. Constitution. And apart from the court security nightmare, to what end is the politicized Justice Department giving full Constitutional rights to what amounts to non-citizen war criminals, terrorists, and combatants picked up on the battlefield?
Columnist Charles Krauthammer says granting enemy combatants the rights of American citizens is unconscionable:
Writing in NationalReviewOnline, former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy claims the motivation is even more invidious:
This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.
Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.
...It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it.
Trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda, tie up our courts for years on issues best left to the president and Congress, and further cripple our intelligence agencies’ efforts to fight terrorists abroad.
KSM and his co-defendants will have all of the benefits and rights that the U.S. Constitution accords those who live here, most importantly the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it was obtained.
Arrested spies commonly use this right to get a better deal out of the government, which will want to avoid opening up its intelligence sources and methods on KSM, what information it got from him, and what else it knows about his fellow al Qaeda operatives.
Finding out what the U.S. intelligence agencies know about al Qaeda will be an incalculable boon to the terrorist organization, which will be able to drop plans and personnel it knows are compromised, and push harder in areas we appear to know nothing about.
Our intelligence agents and military personnel will now have to conduct their capture of the enemy—often in battlefield conditions—under all of the strictures that apply to arrests of garden-variety criminals in the United States. Knowing that al Qaeda leaders may be tried in court, our soldiers and agents will have to gather evidence at the scene of “arrest” and secure it to the standards of a civilian court, all while entering a hostile environment, protecting their own personnel, and leaving without casualties.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who as a judge presided over a trial stemming from the first attack on the World Trade Center, on Friday warned that the Obama administration's decision to bring Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York, along with three other terrorist detainees, to stand trial in a civilian court, reflected a pre-9/11 mindset that viewed terrorism as a simple criminal matter.
Speaking at the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, Mukasey described the move, as “a decision I consider not only unwise, but based on a refusal to face the fact that what we are involved with here is a war with people who follow a religiously-based ideology that calls on them to kill us, and to return instead to the mindset that prevailed before Sept. 11 that acts like the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa and other such acts can and should be treated as conventional crimes and tried in conventional courts.”
Mukasey added that the current administration seems to develop policy decisions "to fit and proceed rhetoric."
Despite the legal roadblocks thrown up by the "detainee lobby," the Bush administration should have pushed much harder to get these individuals tried by military commissions. Depending upon your point of view, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't help, but the Bush Justice Department has to bear significant responsibility for its lack of action. On the other hand, defense lawyers with this odd fixation with terror suspects (can we call them terrorists?) must be suffering an extreme form of what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. Forget the politics; law-abiding citizens, society at large, also have rights to be protected, don't they?
Think back to the 2008 presidential campaign for a minute. Many voters understandably had, well, issues with Sen. John McCain's issues and voting record--even though virtually every reasonable person has the utmost respect for his incredible service to our country.
And one other detail. Unlike the current occupant of the Oval Office, Sen. McCain's rich resume qualified him for the job regardless of whether the voters saw eye to eye (or is that aye to aye?) with him on everything or had misgivings about the McCain agenda. And had the Arizona senator been elected, there would be no runaway federal spending, haphazard national and international security policies, or this strange obsession with socialism, among other things.
Sen. McCain (as did Obama) voted for the TARP bailout; given the economic hysteria at the time, he probably thought in good faith that that was the statesmanlike thing to do. While most of us would probably get sick to our stomach if we had access to the inside machinations of the political world, occasionally good politics and good policy do come together. Occasionally.
However, now comes word via the Washington Times that things were even worse than we thought:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating "unrealistic expectations" about the companies and damaging the program's credibility, according to a report by the program's independent watchdog.
The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other "healthy" financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.
The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year's Wall Street losses.
But an audit released Monday by TARP Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky says senior government officials and Wall Street regulators, including Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, had "affirmative concerns" that several of the nine institutions were financially shaky.
Was it around Labor Day that Sen. McCain pulled ahead in the polls? Then the economic meltdown happened, which crushed his momentum--although the media predictably failed to ask McCain's opponent about his (Obama's) plans to address the financial emergency.
That notwithstanding, Sen. McCain had a golden opportunity to recapture the momentum in the first presidential debate on September 26, 2008, and win the election--despite his lackluster presentation skills and despite ACORN's best efforts.
Did he listen to bad advice from his handlers or was it on his own initiative? Perhaps history will tell use eventually.
Remember, in the run-up to the first debate, Sen. McCain suspended his campaign and floated the idea of postponing the first debate to return to Capitol Hill to intervene in the so-called Paulson financial rescue plan. McCain was roundly criticized for that idea (the same media that refused to hold Obama's feet to the fire on the economic crisis). But the pundits were wrong as usual; the suspense gave McCain an absolute stranglehold on the media campaign coverage--which is exactly where a candidate wants to do.
The debate ultimately went forward on schedule, and there the Senator blew a golden opportunity before an estimated 52.4 million viewers to recapture his lead in the polls. First, he failed to explain to the American public why he suspended his campaign in the first place. (Most people don't have time to follow the news very closely.) His second mistake was pledging on national TV to vote in favor the Paulson bill when it reached the Senate chamber. At the very least he could have hedged, no?
Here's what the senator should have said during the debate:
I suspended my campaign and returned to Washington because the House Republicans were not given a seat at the negotiating table. I personally intervened so that both political parties could play in role in writing the legislation for the benefit of the American people.
No bill will ever be perfect but Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle should have an opportunity to participate in the process.
That being said, I can not support the bill in its present form because it lays the entire pricetag for the corrupt practices of the government and Wall Street at the feet of the American taxpayer.
In 2005, I supported a bill that would have reformed the abuses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two agencies deeply involved in the subprime mortgage scandal. Senator Obama received massive campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Senator Obama and his friends blocked that legislation from going through. Had my legislation become law, we could have minimized this crisis--or avoided it altogether.
Sadly, Sen. McCain said none of this. This was one occasion where if the senator had put himself first, he would have also put the country first.
We've already mentioned in previous posts how the artist formerly known as Stuart Smalley likely owes his disputed U.S. Senate seat to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has more:
Here in Minnesota, ACORN has boasted of playing a major role in the 2008 elections. It claims to have registered 43,000 new voters, which it describes as 75 percent of the state's new registrations. Franken's margin of victory in the Senate race was razor-thin: 312 votes out of about 3 million cast. And Minnesota's laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose. Did ACORN folks pull some fast ones to help get their favorite son Franken elected -- a win that handed Democrats the 60-vote, veto-proof majority that they needed to enact their liberal agenda?
Secretary of State Mark Ritchie assures us that Minnesota's system of voter verification protects electoral integrity.
But here's an uncomfortable fact: Ritchie himself was endorsed by the now-notorious ACORN and elected with its help.
And the American Spectator is reporting that the corrupt community organization appears to have direct ties to the community organizer in chief:
Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House.
This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.
Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis's political director in New York.
Recall that the president incredibly said on national TV that he was unaware that ACORN got much federal funding.
Congratulations to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for at long last forcefully bringing reality into the upside-down, propaganda drenched world that exists only inside the U.N. General Assembly:
Brandishing blueprints of the Auschwitz death camp, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday blasted the United Nations for turning a blind eye to terrorism and urged the world leaders to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Calling out those heads of state who remained in their seats for Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "anti-Semitic rants" earlier this week, Netanyahu also pulled out chilling evidence of the Final Solution.
It was a copy of the minutes of the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders fine-tuned their methodical plans for genocide.
Meantime, the situation with Iran's nukes is even worse than originally thought:
The United States, France and Britain have presented "detailed evidence" to the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog that "Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility," President Obama said Friday.
Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- all in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a G-20 economic summit -- accused Iran of intentionally hiding its nuclear facilities from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They threatened a stiff response if Iran fails to conform to international obligations regarding nuclear development.
Let's face it; President Sarkozy appears to be the only member of this trio that has any credibility in addressing this threat. And isn't it about time that the American (and international) media starts reporting that all the regimes in the Middle East, not just Israel, have grave concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions?
Update: BigGovernment.com has the story of Sarkozy schooling Obama about the Iran nuclear threat. RealClearPolitics.com has more on Sarkozy's contempt for Obama, as reaffirmed by this FNC clip:
Other than as a publicity stunt, is there any logical or security based reason why administration wants to shut down the Gitmo prison?
The Washington Post, one of the administration's many house organs, concedes that the January 2010 deadline might have been overly ambitious:
With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.
Even before the inauguration, President Obama's top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.
The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.
Not to worry: As always in these matters, the Bush administration at fault--although, amazingly enough, only partially this time:
Senior administration officials said the central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration.
The administration kind of likes its predecessor's "state secrets" policy, however, although it seems that it wants to have it both ways. From the Washington Times:
Liberals and conservatives alike harshly criticized a new Obama administration policy designed to make it harder for the government to hamper lawsuits against it by invoking a "state secret" claim, and even the support from privacy-rights groups was tepid and cautious.
From one side, civil-liberties advocate and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald called the new policy merely cosmetic and a continuation of "the very Bush/Cheney policies" that President Obama criticized. From the other, Sept. 11 families activist Debra Burlingame said even those changes would encourage jihadist lawsuits and chill counterterrorism operations
Such privacy-advocacy groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center said the new rules looked good, but said the Obama administration still needed to deliver concrete results - by dropping its support for several Bush-era invocations of the privilege in court and by pushing through Congress a permanent law on the matter.
On Wednesday, the Obama administration appeared to vindicate such longstanding liberal criticisms by invoking the state-secret privilege to urge U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to toss a 2004 warrantless-wiretapping lawsuit filed by the Ashland, Ore., branch of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.
Justice Department lawyer Anthony Coppolino made the same arguments at Wednesday's hearing in San Francisco that Bush administration lawyers had: "Foreign intelligence surveillance is so vital to national security that it is important for the government to maintain secrecy," he argued.
The new policy, announced Wednesday, gives the attorney general the sole authority to invoke a "state secret" claim, which allows the government to exclude evidence it says will compromise national security. The new rules, which take effect Oct. 1, also set a higher standard to make that claim, saying that revealing the information would need to pose "the risk of significant harm to national security"; the previous standard, set by the Supreme Court, allowed a claim when there was a risk of "reasonable possibility of harm" to national security.
Airplane shoe bomber Richard C. Reid no longer faces severe limits on his prison activities or communications after the Obama administration quietly ended years of hard-nosed curbs against the British-born al-Qaeda terrorist.
This summer the Justice Department halted six years of measures that kept Reid from associating or praying with fellow jailed Muslim terrorists, and limited his access to the news media and pen pals.
That move has outraged victims of al-Qaeda and security experts. The recommendation to lift the restrictions was made with input from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, which prosecuted Reid in 2002, federal officials said.
Meanwhile, seven former CIA directors call for a halt on the Justice Department investigation of their former agency:
Arguing that the actions of the Attorney General are essentially putting this country at greater risk of terrorist attack, a bipartisan team of seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote to President Obama today [September 18] urging him to direct Attorney General Eric Holder to close the criminal investigation looking into whether any CIA officers went beyond what they were told was legal in their interrogations during counterterrorism investigations.
Allowing future investigations and prosecutions “will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country,” the seven men write. “In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.”
The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.
"The White House has not been adequately transparent, particularly on how it makes use of new social media techniques, such as this example," he said...
The National Legal and Policy Center, a government ethics watchdog, said archiving the sites would have a "chilling effect" on Web site users who might wish to leave comments critical of the administration.
Another thought for Labor Day: In an excellent posting at National Review Online, Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee reminds us of the alliance between organized labor bosses and the Obama administration, especially as it relates to union strong-arming and card check legislation:
Repeatedly pledging to Big Labor that he will sign a bill that eliminates the secret ballot in union elections, President Obama is the top cheerleader for a policy that would effectively destroy the ability of workers to make real choices in the workplace. Obama would allow outside union organizers to bypass the secret ballot and instead collect workers’ signed “authorization cards” to determine unionization. It doesn’t take much imagination to grasp the potential for abuse inherent in any “card check” drive, since workers would be subjected to immense face-to-face pressure from intimidating union organizers....
Why is Obama so comfortable with this coercive approach to workplace organizing? Perhaps because his political career was launched under similar circumstances. Few remember it now, but Obama’s electoral debut came in 1996, when he won a seat in the Illinois state legislature. “Won” is a bit of a misnomer, however, as candidate Obama ruthlessly eliminated his opponents by disqualifying signatures collected for ballot eligibility. As former National Review political reporter David Freddoso detailed in his 2008 book on Obama, voters’ signatures were thrown out for a variety of spurious reasons, including one woman’s failure to list her married name instead of her maiden name. Other voters were struck from the lists for printing instead of signing their names on the eligibility petitions. Obama not only had his main opponent disqualified, he also succeeded in forcing a protest candidate off the ballot. Obama has personally admitted he felt “uncomfortable” with this hardball political tactic, but success has evidently allayed any guilt. After his opponents were disqualified, Obama won a seat in the state legislature by default.
Just as candidate Obama was willing to go to great lengths to eliminate political opponents to gain a state senate seat, President Obama appears eager to eliminate any semblance of protection for workers in order to curry favor with union bosses. In 2008, Big Labor gave more than $1 billion in campaign contributions to candidates such as Obama who pledged their loyalty to forced unionism.
This is the type of legislation that federal solons would have liked to slip through without anyone noticing. Imagine the media firestorm and outcry from so-called civil libertarians and privacy advocates if Bush was still in office.
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Just asking--could there be an ulterior motive in play? In general, what is the basis for granting these sweeping powers in a free society? Also, since the private sector would take the lead in restoring services after a large-scale cyberattack, why is this bill even necessary? More about this proposed legislation here.
Physical and mental fitness (and diet) are going to be even more important if socialized medicine gets pushed through against the wishes of the American people. Once that takes effect, we'll need to further emphasize self-sufficient lifestyle choices to avoid winding up in the clutches of what will be a horribly failed system. The lawyers often call this approach “self help.”
Most of the national media (with the exception of one news network, a few newspapers, and talk radio) are too busy being stenographers for the administration and the Democrats to grasp what's really going on. As the New York Post describes:
It's been a hilarious August, watching media supporters of President Obama's health care package puzzle over the obscure motivations of the noncompliant Americans rallying against it...
While the commentariat's condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama's room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren't very keen about the government barging into their lives...
After 11 months of federal bailouts and freakouts, Americans have become bone tired of panicky power grabs from Washington. It's the big government, stupid.
The message of the various Tea Party protests, which predated this summer's ahistorical media panic over town hall "lynch mobs," has been pretty simple, says Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the nonprofit that has helped organize the protests, told Reason magazine this spring. "It was: stop spending so much money, stop borrowing so much money, and stop bailing out people who were irresponsible."
Anyway, the point we're making is that it's all good for the local health club to have at least some of the flat-screen TVs in the cardio area tuned to cable news. But that also means that the tedious Obama permanent campaign gets inflicted on anyone working out on the stationary bikes, stairmasters, and so forth. As Valerie Cherish, in one of her catchphrases from The Comeback, would say, "I don't need to see that!"
The living rooms of America are a different matter: Thank goodness for Animal Planet, the Food Network, NatGeo, and other channels, which so far haven't been compromised or politicized (as far as we know, anyway). Even ESPN sadly is no longer safe from politicization.
With its disappearing market share, the mainstream national news media has found itself in a downward spiral. Unfortunately the big media still sets the news agenda to a large degree. With some exceptions mentioned above, most of the America media is blatantly in the tank for the current administration and the Democrats generally (with the exception of Hillary Clinton of 2008 vintage). As we've previously noted, in the year 2008, the fourth estate went morally as well as financially bankrupt.
And while we often try to avoid the nauseating administration lapdogs that dominate most of the national media precincts, we're fortunate that excellent websites and blogs keep readers on the top of the latest one-sided excesses in electronic and print media bias--so that we don't always actually have to watch. In general, taking a vacation from the news cycle can also be very beneficial.
Those aforementioned websites also do a fantastic job in covering developments that most of the national journalists avoid at all costs.
Our view is that all politicians regardless of affiliation should be treated with the same level of scrutiny. With that in mind, we made a list in no particular order of how the media reports on--or not--equivalent political events or issues.
Please feel free to forward additional double-standard examples to us, as this list is by no means exhaustive, and we will otherwise continue to add to it.
As a further public service, we include the crickets sound effect (well known to political- and sports-talk radio fans) to signify instances when the so-called mainstream media ignores--primarily for ideological reasons--a legitimate news story.
===================================
Bush fires 9 U.S. Attorneys. Media response: Headlines, demands for investigation, saturation coverage
Clinton fires 93 U.S. Attorneys. Media response: crickets
===================================
Bush appoints Texas associates to Executive Branch positions: Media response: blatant cronyism, corruption
Obama appoints Chicago associates to Executive Branch positions: Media response: crickets
===================================
Bush politicizes Justice Department: Media response:
saturation coverage culminating in high-level investigation
Obama politicizes Justice Department: Media response: crickets
====================================
Republican lawmaker caught in scandal. Media response::
saturation coverage; mention party affiliation in first sentence
Democrat lawmaker caught in scandal. Media response:
never mention party affiliation, assuming story isn't spiked in the first place
====================================
Bush works out, plays golf, goes on vacation. Media response::
obsessive waste of time, shirking his duties, insensitive in time
of war
Obama works out, plays golf, goes on vacation. Media response:
a glorious affirmation of youthful vitality in the presidency
====================================
Nancy Reagan wears designer clothes: Media response::
corruption, decadence and insensitivity in White House
Michelle Obama wears designer clothes: Media response:
A glorious affirmation of style and glamour in the White House
=====================================
Domestic and (international) protests during Bush administration. Media response: citizens exercising their freedom of speech,
legitimate form of public discourse
Ordinary citizens confronting lawmakers at healthcare townhalls during Obama administration: Media response: angry mobs, paid organizers, racists, brownshirts, "astroturf"
Corollary: Democrats send busloads of union and
ACORN members to pack healthcare town halls. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Bush administration engages in counter-terrorism surveillance: Media response: assault on civil liberties, shredding the Constitution
Obama administration collects names and email addresses of
those citizens opposed to its healthcare reform polices: Media response: crickets
Extensive ACORN multiple state vote fraud in 2008 election. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Cheney meets privately with energy industry officials. Media response: corrupt practices in White House,
demands for investigation
Obama meets privately with pharmaceutical industry officials. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Bush compared to Hitler, caricatured, etc. Media response:
citizens exercising freedom of speech
Obama compared to Hitler, caricatured, etc. Media response:
citizens engaging in racist acts
=====================================
Bush invokes God, refers to his his religious faith. Media response:
violation of church and state, religious zealotry
Obama invokes God, refers to his his religious faith. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Extensive media focus on John McCain's health and age
(even though age discrimination is against the law).
John McCain releases his medical records.
Coverage of health of Bill Clinton (obesity) or
Barack Obama (lifetime cigarette smoker). Neither
candidate releases medical records. Media response: You guessed it--crickets
======================================
Sarah Palin's background in Alaska. Media response:
Sends hundreds of reporters to dig up dirt on the governor.
Obama's background in Chicago. Media response: crickets
======================================
Sarah Palin's gaffes and misstatements (real or imagined). Media response: saturation coverage
Obama/Bidens gaffes and misstatements (real). Media response: crickets
======================================
NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell criticizes Sarah Palin for
neglecting her family in favor of seeking the vice presidency.
NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell (or anyone else) omits mentioning
that she (O'Donnell) has three small children at home.
=======================================
John Kerry's Vietnam Service. Media response:
constantly mentioned during 2004 presidential campaign
Bob Dole's bravery on the WWII battlefield. Media response during 1996 presidential
campaign: crickets
=======================================
Media in general celebrates/promotes teen promiscuity
Gov. Palin's daughter becomes pregnant: Media response:
Teen promiscuity is no longer worth celebrating or promoting
How does an administration respond when its domestic agenda verges on imploding? It's generally called "Operation Change The Subject," through a manufactured scandal and a related witchhunt.
The Obama administration launched a criminal investigation Monday into harsh questioning of detainees during President George W. Bush's war on terrorism, revealing CIA interrogators' threats to kill one suspect's children and to force another to watch his mother sexually assaulted.
At the same time, President Barack Obama ordered changes in future interrogations, bringing in other agencies besides the CIA under the direction of the FBI and supervised by his own national security adviser. The administration pledged questioning would be controlled by the Army Field Manual, with strict rules on tactics, and said the White House would keep its hands off the professional investigators doing the work.
Despite the announcement of the criminal probe, several Obama spokesmen declared anew—as the president has repeatedly—that on the subject of detainee interrogation he "wants to look forward, not back" at Bush tactics. They took pains to say decisions on any prosecutions would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder, not the White House.
Monday's five-year-old report by the CIA's inspector general, newly declassified and released under a federal court's orders, described severe tactics used by interrogators on terror suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill and tried to frighten another with a mock execution of another prisoner.
It remains to be seen if there is any legal culpability on the part of the interrogators, but this administration has a unique approach to homeland security: try to release the bad guys, and prosecute the (arguably) good guys. And harsher techniques have been on display in any given episode of The Shield.
AG Holder tapped New Haven, CT, career federal prosecutor John Durham to conduct the initial investigation into whether there is enough evidence to warrant a full investigation of whether current or former CIA employees violated anti-torture or other laws while questioning high-value terror detainees.
Writing in the Washington Post, former CIA general counsel Jeffery Smith provides six reasons why such prosecutions would not be in the national interest:
•These techniques were authorized by the president and approved by the Justice Department. The relevant committees of Congress were briefed. Although the Justice Department's initial legal opinions were badly flawed, the fact remains that the agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing the law said the techniques were "legal." That alone will make prosecutions very difficult.
•the CIA provided the inspector general's report to the Justice Department in 2004. Justice has not prosecuted any CIA officers but did successfully prosecute a contractor who beat a detainee to death, an incident that was initially reported to the department by the CIA...Prosecutions would set the dangerous precedent that criminal law can be used to settle policy differences at the expense of career officers.
• after Justice declined to prosecute, the CIA took administrative action, including disciplinary action against those officers whose conduct it deemed warranted such responses.
•prosecuting CIA officers risks chilling current intelligence operations.
• prosecutions could deter cooperation with other nations. It is critical that we have the close cooperation of intelligence services around the world.
• President Obama has decisively changed the policies that caused so much damage.
Apparently the administration may continue the controversial rendition policy.
