It’s Not Over/It’s Over
by digby
Matthews: How do you read that…what he just said?
Woodward: No. In other words he’s not going to, he doesn’t want investigations. I mean if, first of all in some of these things, it’s so ambiguous and uh, he has got to get beyond the past. He does not want to create the feeling, which in a sense this week he did create by saying he’s going to close Guantanamo, that the war on terror is over. It is not over. What he said is some of the tactics, namely torture and harsh interrogation tactics are gone but the war continues and if there is a, some sort of perpetual investigation of these things the message will be we’re going soft and I tell you those in the intelligence world and the military and I think Obama himself doesn’t want to send that message.
Matthews: Well let’s talk about the Republicans on the Hill. What are they worried, aren’t they trying to hold Eric Holder’s feet to the fire and say “Promise you won’t launch an investigation as our new Attorney General”.
O’Donnell: Well one of the problems is if they do dig back into all of these things you do lose some of the Republicans support and President Obama’s trying to reach out. You also reinforce what detractors of the Bush/Cheney years already think. So there’s very little political upside. And so Eric Holder has been certainly tested and they definitely, Republicans definitely want to be able to feel like they can stick with their strong principle of defense without having to worry about digging back into some of those things.
Matthews: Yeah. Anne obviously the people on the left, the netroots people, John Conyers up on the Hill, they want action. They want some kind of at least an extra-legal kind of truth and reconciliation commission like you had in South Africa that doesn’t prosecute but does investigate.
Kornblut: And yet we haven’t heard any signal from Obama or the White House itself that they would authorize that, encourage it. Even something that would be as sort of as benign as a truth and reconciliation commission, every indication is they want to leave that to reporters, historians. They want to move on, you know the Hill can do what the Hill can do, but they’re not behind it.
Matthews: Well why did we prosecute people at Abu Ghraib for abusing prisoners if we’re not going to prosecute people who may have authorized that kind of treatment?
Fineman: It is an issue. But Obama has to run the country and he and the leaders of the Democratic Party on the Hill have said “It’s not worth the cost”. I mean I know that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate wants no parts of this. Whatever John Conyers is going to do on the House side, he’s going to do and you’ll hear a lot of noise from him and maybe some investigations. But it’s not going to be backed up by the Democratic leadership in Congress. It just isn’t.
(crosstalk)
Woodward: Well who would you investigate and prosecute? I mean the people who did these interrogations and so forth believed with good reason they had authority from the President.
Matthews: They had orders.
Woodward: Now you know it’s too late to impeach Bush. It’s over.
According to Bob Woodward, Obama “implied” the War On Terror is over, which he didn’t. And also according to Woodward, since Bush is out of office “it’s over” which is isn’t. The disaster he created will be with us for a very long time, but the official record of the Bush years of war and torture and economic disaster will apparently be left to “reporters and historians” which means that, in the near term at least, the villagers will clean everything up.
Maybe this will be where the internet makes a difference. As frustrating as it is to watch current story lines being written by liars and con artists and taken up by the press as if they are received wisdom, the past is documented in thousands and thousands of pages that were written in real time. They can no longer rework the past the way they used to, at least not unchallenged.
You can certainly understand why they would want to. Bob Woodward has a vested interest in letting the past go and telling everyone to “get over it.” So does Howard Fineman — and Chris Matthews, for that matter, although in this case he is at least playing Devil’s Advocate. They were cheerleaders for Bush’s torture regime and his manly, muscular, macho leadership style which nearly drove them insane with yearning and admiration. They enthusiastically enabled what happened and in some cases strongly endorsed it.
I went back and looked at Bush At War, Woodwards’ first book about the “war president.” I recalled being appalled at the time by this interview he did for the book, printed in the Washington Post. But in retrospect the giddy reaction in the press to his cartoonish, Buck Turgidson style is downright scary:
On Wednesday, Sept. 26, just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Bush surprised his war cabinet, which had been debating when to begin the bombing of targets in Afghanistan, by declaring: “Anybody doubt that we should start this Monday or Tuesday?”
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld eventually convinced Bush that planning was incomplete and the bombing should not begin for another week. Bush said he was intentionally prodding his aides.
“One of my jobs is to be provocative,” he said. “Seriously, to provoke people into — to force decisions, and to make sure it’s clear in everybody’s mind where we’re headed. There was a certain rhythm and flow to this, and I was beginning to get a little frustrated. . . . It was just not coming together as quickly as we had hoped. And I was trying to force the issue without compromising safety.”
Did he ever explain what he was doing?
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m the commander — see, I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
In a normal world, the media would have reported that we had a childish, maniac running the country in a time of national crisis. (Did anyone seriously believe that Bush was playing some psychological game with his staff when he wanted to rush ahead with that bombing campaign before it was ready? Please…) Instead, the press chered his puerile chest thumping and begged him to take the gloves off. And now that it’s been shown to be both immoral and counterproductive, now that the country is in serious crisis, they want to avoid their part of the responsibility as well by sweeping everything that happened under the rug.
They are telling us to “get over it.” Again.
They backed Bush’s regime from the beginning and with everythi8ng they had, from draining the treasury to war in Iraq to deregulation to torture to Guantanamo. And they did it consciously:
Although Donahue didn’t know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.
That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the “America’s News Channel,” have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”
The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Donohue was the highest rated show on the network and its numbers were growing, so that decision was never about ratings or “competitors.” It was about conforming to a perceived public fervor that was being created by the networks themselves with conservative propaganda. It was quite the clever, self reinforcing circle jerk. (Greenwald ran down a number of similar examples in this post.)
This was just the latest in a series of epic institutional media failures that contributed to the hellish situation in which we find ourselves today. It goes back many, many years but their behavior during the past 16 has been catastrophic.
And from what we’re seeing right now, they are still at it. Once again, they are running with conservative propaganda and misinformation without even a passing thought. I must have heard this misinformation (via Steve Benen) at least 25 times coming from reporters and gasbags over the week-end:
It appears that the preliminary, incomplete numbers put together by the CBO were distributed to a small handful of lawmakers in both parties earlier in the week. Someone (Republican congressional offices) then passed the misleading data onto the AP, which predictably ran with the incomplete numbers, telling the public that it “will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy.”
Other major media outlets quickly followed, and voila, Republicans had a talking point: “Boehner and other Republican aides roamed the Capitol press galleries, flogging the CBO numbers.”
Of course they did. And within a few days, this incorrect information has become conventional wisdom. According to Cokie’s Law, at this point the facts don’t matter. It’s out there.
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