Sacred Disorder

Here’s an altogether amazing column from David Broder, the longtime Washington Post columnist. Broder, often called the “dean of the Washington press corps,” argues against prosecution of anyone involved in the development and execution of the program to torture detainees.

The column, to be published Sunday, is dense with the usual contemptuous regard for fact. For example:

Obama needs to take it on himself, as he started to do — not pass the buck to Attorney General Eric Holder, as he seemed to be suggesting in his later statements on the issue.

This — in a column arguing against prosecutions because of their political consequences — is amazingly un-self-reflective. Apparently, Broder has already forgotten that the Bush administration thoroughly politicized the Department of Justice as a PR instrument to rationalize every criminal action it wanted to take. Now, Broder turns right around and, ignoring the proper independent operation of the DOJ himself, urges Obama to effectively intervene in the agency’s work in order to protect criminals for political reasons.

I love this succinct graf too:

But having vowed to end the practices [of torture], Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats.

Astounding. First is the odd phrase “retroactive search,” as if that’s something unusual. Exactly what criminal investigation is not “retroactive”? Perhaps Mr. Broder prefers to investigate crimes before they occur?

Then there’s the most amazing of all: use of the word “scapegoats.” It’s another one of those Orwellian language moves for which the press has become infamous. They’re not criminals or suspected criminals. They are scapegoats. If you conduct an investigation and find plenty of evidence of a criminal act, how are you scapegoating anyone? Is someone beside the suspected people responsible for the torture? Teletubbies? Mr. SquarePants? Monica Lewinski?

I suppose he means the suspects are scapegoats in a political game. So, if there’s a political motive present for anyone advocating prosecution, the crimes should be ignored? In the world of David Broder and the rest of the Washington political and media class, apparently so.

As another example of the delusional self-aggrandisement of the punditry, check out this video of David Gregory, recently cited by Glenn Greenwald. At the beginning of the video, Gregory, who is the host of Meet the Press, says he’s going to do some analysis. What follows is literally a recitation of talking points. There’s no “analysis” at all. It’s the verbal equivalent of linking to other people’s writing.

My disgust with Barack Obama continues to grow. In the most recent travesty,  Obama’s Department of Justice has literally reiterated the Bush argument that it is not bound to turn over “secret” evidence in a lawsuit challenging the legality of warrantless eavesdropping. (Weirdly, the evidence in this particular case isn’t even secret.) Glenn Greenwald has the unsavory details.

Greenwald also writes about how some progressives are defending Obama’s actions even though they vehemently opposed the same behavior by the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has published a discussion about Sen. Patrick Leahy’s proposal to form a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine whether members of the Bush administration broke the law by authorizing torture.  All but one of the discussion’s five participants favor the commission, noting that the U.S. is bound by its own laws and treaties to conduct an inquiry and recommend prosecution if warranted.

But Obama is resisting that too, claiming that we need to “look forward,” rather than back. As one of the  writers notes, prosecuting violators of the law is most certainly looking forward, since the point is to discourage future transgressions of the law.

Many progressives, while annoyed by Obama’s shocking reversal of his campaign rhetoric about these issues, are producing embarassing rhetoric themselves. They argue that Obama is buying time or otherwise has some rational but private reason for following Bush’s path. They also cite the good things he has done, like forbidding torture by executive order.

What these apologists don’t seem to realize is that if the new administration continues to support policies that give the president and his associates the right to violate the law without punishment, we continue on our route to an imperial presidency. The only difference in Bush and Obama in this regard right now is that Obama appears to be a “benevolent dictator” while Bush was an evil one.

The positive actions that Obama has taken could mean little in a broader context. It’s great that he wrote an executive order forbidding torture, for example, but the order can be reversed and, without involvement of the courts, there is nothing to prohibit use of torture in the future. Everything will depend on the benevolence of His Majesty, the President.

It is sickening that nobody in the Obama administration will answer questions about this turn of events. It’s also revolting that the media are not sounding a very loud alarm about these developments. But that just goes to demonstrate how our stenographic press has enabled the policies that have brought the country to ruin.

Here’s Stephen Colbert’s send-up of the tedious claim that Barack Obama is — gasp! — an elitist.

I found it particularly repelling when New York Times columnist David Books recently wrote that Obama had image problems because he’s not the sort you imagine at an Applebee’s salad bar. That’s a reprise of the criticism that Gore and Kerry were out of touch with common reality while George Bush was the kinda man you’d like to have a beer with.

Well, nobody wants to have a beer with George Bush these days and criticism of Brooks’ type sounds as stupid to intelligent people as Colbert depicts it here.

We’ll have to wait to see if the usual Republican tactic of frequently repeating a false or exaggerated claim — a kind of brainwashing, really — works as well this election. Newt Gingrich literally taught this tactic to freshmen Congressmen when Republicans got control of the House during the Clinton years. Such statements fall under what Colbert came to call “truthiness.”