Today, as I was driving, I happened to catch the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, where, as guests, she had Eleanor Clift from Newsweek, Tony Blankley from the Washington Times, and Doyle McManus from the LA Times - kind of like a McLaughlin Group road show.
The subject being discussed was the NY Times story about the administration's monitoring of financial data without a warrant.
Now, I'm not too familiar with Doyle McManus, but I watch the Tony and Eleanor show on McLaughlin each week, where Tony is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, and Eleanor is the resident "bleedng heart liberal", and their exchange today literally made my jaw drop.
Of course, Tony, as usual, thinks whatever the Bushites do is just dandy, but what surprised me was Eleanor's response.
She said that "of course" the govt. was monitoring financial data, and put forth the usual right wing arguments for the loss of privacy in this country - it's only the terrorists being watched; honest people have nothing to fear; it's not in real time anyway, and my personal favorite, that any "average American" would "want and expect" the government to do this. She felt it was the government's "duty" to spy on us.
But the real kicker was what came next, and was completely out of line for someone who has worked as a reporter for as long as she has. She said that what really needed to be examined was why the NY Times "broke" with the rest of the newspapers who had "agreed" not to print the story, and that it was "incumbent" upon them to explain why they had exposed the program, which, in her opinion, would alert the terrorists that the govt. was watching ther banking!
McManus quickly corrected her and said that there had been no agreement between the papers to not print the story, only that the administration had asked them not to (just like the NSA program).
I don't know about the rest of you, but I am completely sick and tired of these "pundits" that are supposed to represent the "left",(Last week's outrage was the pundit that was supposedly from the left that kept referring to the NSA spying program as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" on another NPR show) then go on to try to explain to the public why they should just shut up and go along with the administration, move along, there's nothing to see here.
It is time for a new class of pundits on the left!
With friends like this, who needs enemies.