What on earth do they have to do with with one another, you ask? Well, in her Washington Post op ed entitled Goodlings Amok, Ruth Marcus recognizes the incongruity of connecting them, but she does so in a way that showsw the Village, of which she as a writer at the Post is a key part, has now decided the Boy Emperor has no cloths. Please note the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, before below the fold I offer a few observations of my own:
You might think that the two of these have nothing in common save the happenstance that both are the subject of devastating new reports: Goodling about the stomach-turning politicization of the Justice Department; the deficit about the stomach-turning state of the federal treasury.
But the linkage goes beyond the adjective. The ousted Goodling and the lingering deficit are twin manifestations of the Bush administration's overarching contempt for government and blind adherence to ideology.
Iinvite you to keep reading.
Marcus describes the administration as being about to leave office having trashed the place - well beyond removing a few W's. This is unfortunately yet another example of the way those in the Village try to prove how clever they are, but also how "balanced" since we now know that tale was planted by Bushites as a way of influencing the press when they entered office - planted being the operable word because all evidence is that no such parnk ever occurred. It is unimportant and irrelevant to the larger point Marcus is making, but if she can be so petty I feel obligated to point it out so that I am "fair and balanced" - oh wait, that isn't the line offered by the Washington Post, although with far too much that appears on its editorial and op ed pages one might have begun to wonder.
Why am I being so nasty to my local newspaper? Perhaps had they been willing to be so direct and honest about the current administration from the beginning, we would not now find ourselves in the mess we now do, with a war longer than WWII, with a deficit spiraling out of control, and only now beginning to find out something of the extent of political corruption - there is no other word - that has been rampant in this administration. Perhaps if people had worried less about to which cocktail parties they might be invited and whether or not top administration officials would return their phone calls and done the hard work of journalism of developing and maintaining sources below the top leve we would have known was was necessary to be informed citizens and - as I am prone to remind some of those I know - the elected members of the House and Senate might have seen enough to be motivated to insist on performing their oversight responsibilities.
Let me leave Marcus for a moment. One of the lead pieces on the Opinion page of the Washington Post website is by the invaluable Thomas Ricks. It is entitled Scolding Donal Rumsfeld and contains a brief introduction and then a slightly edited version of the letter General Eric Shinseki sent just before he "stepped down." Read it, and see the arrogance and incompetence of the leadership of our Department of Defense. I want to quote one small part as it appears. This is about his testimony to Congress on the force levels necessary for Iraq, testimony which was undercut by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and led to the public undercutting of Shinseki:
My estimate, based upon past experiences, was provided in a way so as not to foreclose options for you or the Combatant Commander . . . . As a matter of fact, neither you nor Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz ever discussed this issue with me despite all the commentary in the press. . . .
Let me return to Marcus. I will not quote much - it is a brief article which you can quickly scan. The quality of the writing is not that noteworthy. She does offer a number of examples to illustrate her idea of combining the two contemporaneous news items in order to illustrate the larger point. She focuses on Goodling's use of "good American" to mean "Republican." She offers the semblance of fir and balanced by writing
Every administration has its Goodlings, inexperienced punks who flaunt their authority as conspicuously as a West Wing badge.
Most administrations find ways to keep the Goodlings under control and the grown-ups in charge. The trouble with this one is that it is riddled with Goodlings Gone Wild, incapable of or unwilling to distinguish between the proper pursuit of political aims and the responsible administration of government.
When I read that I tried to remember any Washington reporter willing to grant the implied latitutde to the Clinton administration, because I clearly remember the Village attacking the Clintons for the travel office, accepting the word of disgruntled former employees like Gary Aldrich, and so on - an attitude perhaps shaped by the mayor of the Village, the Post's David Broder, who seemed personally offended by the Clintons and their young staffers. Why, because they wore jeans in the White House? That kind of reaction was part of what underlay Linda Tripp in her eagerness to use her relationship with Monica Lewinsky to try to bring the Clintons down.
But this is not about the Clintons. And my diary is not even so much about the Bush administration. Rather, it is about the press, about how it has failed in its responsibility to be the eyes and ears of the American people. Editorial writers can get their panties in a bunch because there is no Federal shield law for reporters - the Post had a lead editorial on that subject within the week. And yet there was little criticism Judith Miller, whose incarceration undergirds this demand for a shield law, even after she was exposed as a dishonest water carrier for the administration. At least the New York Times finally had the decency to remove her from their employ, previous Pulitzer notwithstanding.
Look, I am glad that Marcus is willing to take apart the ideological dstruction of government by the Bush administration. It is good that she can now recognize
The deterioration of the nation's budgetary picture under the reckless stewardship of this administration is the fiscal equivalent of the Goodlingization of the executive branch. President Bush put adherence to Republican theology -- taxes must be cut -- over prudent governing.
and that after recognizing the huge financial mess this administration will leave to that which will succeed it, she can conclude her article like this:
Monica Goodling was not the problem. She was the symptom of an administration so certain of the correctness of its worldview that it never pauses to reconsider.
But it is now seven and half years into this administration, and the ideologically driven nature of this administrations actions have been clear to any sentient creature who was paing attention for more than half that span of time. Hell, Paul O'Neill resigned in December of 2002 and began criticizing the administration. His book The Price of Loyalty was published in 2004 and what he wrote about the administration's reaction to September 11 should have removed all doubt then about how the key figures in the administration ignore reality in the pursuit of ideology.
What is scary is to see how little the press seems to have learned. Bush was a genial guy, so they did not look below the surface of "compassionate conservative" to recognize that this was little more than a facade. Despite the clear record of Karl Rove they made no effort to connect the dots on politicization of governmental functions. And we have seen precisely the same thing in their handling of John McCain, whose misstatement and contradictions and flip-flops and at times incompetence have been "papered over" (sorry, could not resist) because he is a "war hero." Newspapers should be able to use language more accurately. McCain is not a war hero - he is not a hero because of heroic feats in combat. He is a man who bore great indignities and even torture after being shot down. One might better say he was heroic as a prisoner of war. But perhaps that is too precise a parsing for a press that cannot yet recognize that we are in an armed occupation of country that does not want us there. When McCain first said that the Surge enabled the Anbar / Sunni Awakening, why did so few in the press immediately call him on two factual errors: first, the time sequence is wrong (and this was noted by at least a few), but of greater importance, the surge of additional troops was into Baghdad ad the awakening was taking place on a region centered on Ramadi. Hello.
Thomas Jefferson wrote often about the necessity of a free press, and of having a citizenry informed by reading the papers. I suspect he we be appalled by much of our electronic media, which seeks less to inform than to entertain, and thereby to distract. Bread and Circus is nothing new under the sun, as any student of Rome could inform us.
If our liberal democracy, our democratic republic, is going to survive as anything except a shell where the external forms continue but the meaning has been lost, we have serious work to do. Of course we must reclaim our government, we must elect people who will abide by and restore the constitutional balance designed by our founders, and if we cannot find what we need among those now running for office, then we must run ourselves, as several members of this community have done, for public and for party office. But we also must insist on a restoration of the press to its proper role.
Yes, as a student of history I am well aware that we have a history in the early Republic of a very partisan press, publications that would put both the Washington Times and Fox News to shame. But in those days, not all the papers espoused the Federalist cause - they were opposed by those advocating the cause of the Jeffersonians. I am not advocating that we return to those days, that we seek to turn CNN or MSNBC into the balance for Fox. I think I can be reasonably certain that being able to tell us the latest escapades of Paris Hilton was not the primary reason the First Amendment provides freedom of the press.
I come not to praise nor to bury the press, not even Ruth Marcus. I am of the persuasion that we should acknowledge when the press does get something right, however belatedly. So MS Marcus, congratulations on finally being able to see and write how overly politicized and incompetent the current Federal administration has been.
I also think we must challenge. So MS Marcus, given the results of blind adherence to a philosophy not grounded in reality and the devastating effect it has had on our government, the nation and the world, why cannot you and your compatriots apply what you may finally have learned to the political pronouncements of people like John McCain or some of those in Congress of both parties whose advocacy is for such narrow causes that it is destructive of our polity and hence of our democracy? Will you even acknowledge how wrong you were about this administration before you continue your ridiculousness insistence that Obama say he was wrong about the surge? Pot, Kettle, Black?
Sorry I am not in a particularly thoughtful mood today. But it is precisely because Marcus can call this administration on its bullshit that I am angry. I am furious that only now, when this administration is thankfully almost over (although it can still do far too much damage) that people like Marcus are willing to say that the boy emperor has no clothes.
Goodlins Amok? Perhaps you, MS Marcus, need to write another column, and call this one Press AWOL.
For the rest of you? Have a nice day.
Peace.