Wednesday, July 19, 2006
The Disconnect Between The Washington Post's Newsroom And Editorial Page...
...is almost as bad as the one over at the Wall Street Journal. While the WaPo's editorial page and A-list pundit consiglieres such as Kurtz continue to verbally fellate Bush and Company in particular and Republicans in general, actual WP reporters like Walter Pincus and Dan Froomkin keep doing their best to inject a little reality into the proceedings (emphases mine):
Amid all the other news yesterday, the attorney general's startling revelation that President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation into the administration's controversial secret domestic spying programs hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
Bush's move -- denying the requisite security clearances to attorneys from the department's ethics office -- is unprecedented in that office's history. It also comes in stark contrast to the enthusiastic way in which security clearances were dished out to a different group of attorneys: Those charged with finding out who leaked information about the program to the press. It is not common for a president to personally intervene to stop an investigation of his own administration. The most notorious case, of course, was the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal. Among the many major differences, however: In that case, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow Nixon's order.
Bush's action is also another example of what I have previously noted is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them.
All information that embarrasses or exposes Bush is bad information that must be suppressed at all costs.
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