Buying Into The Program

In a sane political world, Press The Meat this Sunday would be a very interesting show. This is because over the past couple of days it’s become obvious that Karl Rove is selling the line that he found out about Plame from Libby and that Libby says that his source for the Plame leak was none other than Tim Russert. It’s long past time that the King of the Kewl Kids got the kind of treatment that Judy Miller has received. He’s up to his neck in this thing.

Here is what NBC released after Russert testified:

Mr. Russert told the Special Prosecutor that, at the time of that conversation, he did not know Ms. Plame’s name or that she was a CIA operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr. Libby. Mr. Russert said that he first learned Ms. Plame’s name and her role at the CIA when he read a column written by Robert Novak later that month.[emphasis mine]

As I and others have been writing since the summer, that is a very carefully worded statement that leaves open the clear possibility that Russert did tell Libby that “Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA.”

It is long past time that Russert was asked about this. He has grilled everyone from Wilson to Novak on his show about this matter and has never mentioned the fact that he was questioned by the prosecutor, nor has he explained the overlawyered answer. And the Washington press corpse has been much too polite (or intimidated) to mention it, as far as I can tell, anywhere. (Sidney Schanberg wrote about this in the Village Voice.)

As I wrote last summer, all it would take is for one intrepid journalist (or guest on Tim’s show) to ask:

Prior to Bob Novak’s column in 2003 did you tell anyone who works in the administration that Joseph Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA?

In a healthy media climate, that would not be a problem. But our political culture in Washington has become dangerously removed from reality. Unsurprisingly, James Wolcott says it best:

If it looks as if Cheney has to resign and Bush himself enters the Nixon danger zone, we’ll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn’t the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it’s the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart. It’s failed the country, and it’s played by its own rules for too long, and “criminalizing politics” is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war with Judith Miller serving as the Angie Dickinson to their Rat Pack and Richard Cohen auditioning for the part of Joey Bishop.

I would also point out that the media pearl clutching was an important aspect of the Florida Recount (orchestrated by Karl Rove) in which the likes of Jeff Greenfield quivered like little old ladies every night fretting about how the country wouldn’t survive if the election wasn’t decided within minutes. This is an old trick.

This story is about a lot of different things. First and foremost, it’s about this country going to war on false pretenses, the real reasons for which are obscure and inscrutable. It’s about a powerful GOP political machine that thought it could foist off the village idiot as president and became so seized by hubris that it literally thought it could get away with anything.

But it is also about a toxic political culture in the nation’s capital that has abdicated its responsibility to behave within certain norms of decent behavior. After eight long years of being fed the juiciest tabloid lies from a masterful Republican disinformation campaign and a group of friendly GOP special prosecutors, the media became joined with the republican establishment and took on its cheap ethics and ruthless attitudes. They began to identify with them. They helped them destroy Bill Clinton’s reputation and piled-on to keep Al Gore from the presidency with a puerile smear campaign which they admitted to waging just because they found it amusing. And when George W. Bush became president, their condescending refrain to the majority of the country who didn’t vote for him was “get over it.”

That cozy relationship among the purveyors of Republican cant led directly into an unquestioning acceptance of administration lies after 9/11. The country would have rallied temprorarily regardless of the media’s complicity in GOP messaging during that time, but the previous 10 years of confederacy between the hungry media and the Republican noise machine established a system in which it was possible to perpetrate one of the most outrageous frauds in history — the Iraq war. The culture that marginalized dissent, that mocked anything other than manufactured beltway conventional wisdom and that normalized character assassination as “fair game” created a jingoistic circus that can be best illustrated with the allegedly liberal icon Dan Rather, saying: “I would willingly die for my country at a moment’s notice and on the command of my president….”

Tha media then created a hagiography of George W. Bush that was hallucinogenic. From Howard Fineman:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ‘80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform—whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ‘60s—but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

Ermine robes and flight jackets. That was the apogee of mainstream media Republican worship and it carried this administration right into an illegal war, unprecedented debt, and even a torture regime. The beltway press, which eagerly assisted the Republican party in the political battles of the 1990’s quite naturally fell into line when the “winners” of that war decided to use real guns and bullets for political purposes.

The war with Iraq could not have happened without them and they have a lot to answer for — most especially for uncritically supporting an insane decision to unilaterally attack a country which had not attacked us and then affirmatively helping the administration cover-up the fact that they lied about the reasons for it — with cocktail party gossip no less.

Maybe someday a member of the press corpse will ask Tim Russert whether he helped the White House expose an undercover CIA agent, but I’m not holding my breath. There are only a handful of people in Washington who seem to have even a modicum of courage and I’ve yet to see a member of the mainstream press among them.

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