Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier wrote Saturday about the Conservative Political Action Conference. He excoriated Mitt Romney for a vast number of distortions at his speech there. But, as is the common practice of so many in the field of journalism, where I labored for three decades, he had to add some "balance" at the end:
In these hyper-partisan times, it's rarely good enough to respond to an unfair attack with a factual argument. Fire is fought with more high heat. And so it was this week, when liberal bloggers reacted to the CPAC distortions with false attacks of their own. On the Daily Kos Web site, one blogger noted the standing ovation given to "the self-confessed war criminal Dick Cheney."
Whatever one might think of Cheney's interrogation policies, the former vice president has never been charged with a war crime, much less confessed to one.
No matter. The same blogger criticized anti-liberal protests at CPAC, adding with a rare burst of evenhandedness: "Some of what went on was the same kind of silliness partisans of all stripes engage in."
Forget for the moment that Mr. Fournier confuses anonymous with pseudonymous. That rarely evenhanded blogger was me. Anybody with 30 extra seconds of research time can discover my real name by clicking on the About link at Daily Kos. But I know full well how deadlines as well as preset narratives can get in the way of digging a little deeper.
In his haste to get his piece into print, Fournier seems to have missed the link included in the piece where I wrote the truth about Dick Cheney. The link to Jonathan Karl's interview with Cheney at ABC News, in which the former Vice President declared:
CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that...
KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding?
CHENEY: Yes.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote:
There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it's the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America's closest Western ally, certainly believes it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture. ...
These are not my opinions and they are not hyperbole. They are legal facts. Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn't. Cheney's clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.
digby points out:
Cheney can say that he doesn't believe that waterboarding should be a war crime but that doesn't mean it isn't one. And every Justice Department coming along behind him can cover up for his war crime by failing to charge him with it, but that doesn't mean that he didn't confess to signing off on waterboarding on national TV last week-end -- which, again, is a war crime. Therefore, Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime and just because our political system is too weak to prosecute him for it doesn't mean it's a lie to point that out.
Mr. Fournier argues that it's the fault of lies from the likes of Mitt Romney and me that Americans are disengaged from politics, so cynical that they stop voting and don't get involved even in their own communities. "These are consequences of cutting corners in the public square," says he.
What exactly are those consequences? It doesn't cost research-challenged journalists their jobs. And it obviously doesn't affect those who cut corners on the rule of law, since John Yoo and Jay Bybee still have their law licenses and Dick Cheney gets standing ovations from those who boo the foes of torture.