Speaking of Disgrace: Bush Against the Press

Why aren’t we winning the “war on terror”? Because the New York Times won’t let us. That, anyway, is how President Bush sees it. He was asked this morning about the disclosure by the Times and several other newspapers of his administration’s latest end-run around the law—the administration’s wiretapping of financial wire transfers “involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States.” It’s the equivalent of the NSA’s snooping on Americans’ Internet habits and emails, listening in on international phone calls and the calls of Americans speaking to anyone abroad. (Most Americans speak to other Americans, of course, so the president’s explanation that his administration is only keeping track of foreigners, let alone of suspected al-Qaeda members, is as has become habit, bogus). The press obviously if belatedly quit taking him at his word sometime in 2003, when the number of dead American soldiers and dead Iraqis became the only evidence of mass destruction on Bush’s watch in Iraq, and the administration’s strategy of preemptive war the most active weapon of mass destruction at the moment. A few people inside Bush’s government became more willing to speak to the press and stop this run-away heist of constitutional values in the name of a war judged, juried and executed by Bush without check and plenty of imbalance. The New York Times’ James Risen has been among the few but committed reporters who’ve done what much of the press, and all of the television media, refuse to do: hold Bush’s junta-like tactics and gut-skunked strategies to account. Risen’s piece on the Bush administration’s snooping around financial records reveals more of the Bush penchant for evasion and lies, for accruing power by all means necessary. But so does Bush himself. Hear him roar this morning in the Roosevelt Room, when he took the last question during a brief exchange with reporters: Virtually every word was equally veil and lie, evasion and PR, pandering and, to the truth anyway, scalding. Read the rest...