"Trusting Our President" With "Britney" Broder

The Dean Of Beltway “Journalism” pontificated as follows from here (h/t to Thers at Eschaton for posting about this first here – the subject is Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to name a special counsel to examine allegations of torture against those suspected of terrorism by Bushco)…

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

(And before I forget, I should note that the post title is an “homage” of sorts to the response provided by non-philosopher Britney Spears, who once told Michael Moore in “Fahrenheit 9/11” that we should “trust the president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that,” here, since I believe that mentality has driven everything Broder has written on this subject in particular.)

In response to what Broder wrote today, I give you the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials (from 1945-1946, with the defendants pictured above – the plural was used by Jackson because of the multiple Nazi defendants of course, but I think the context fits Bushco also)…

At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice, entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used…

…

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.

…

The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.

Thank God we have such a legal standard to fall back on, one which Broder (a young man when these glorious words were uttered) and the other Beltway punditry, to say nothing of our politicians, would do well to reconsider.

And in response to Broder, we have this from Adam Serwer at Tapped (h/t Atrios)…

There is, naturally, no concern for the rule of law here (by Broder), a complete indifference to those who died in CIA custody, or the fact that the IG report itself states that torture was used on people "without justification."

I've already said I don't think those interrogators who stayed within the OLC's guidelines should be prosecuted -- I hold the policymakers ultimately responsible for the implementation of torture as policy. But for Broder, it doesn't matter that what the Bush administration did was illegal -- the powerful deserve immunity, because in holding them accountable, the "cost to the country would simply be too great." What, I wonder, will be the cost for becoming a society in which torture, torture, is not a crime but simply a policy preference?

Broder isn't so much saying that the powerful deserve to ignore the law so much as he is saying that the statute of limitations is up once they leave office. He cops without reservation or qualification to the idea that Cheney did something illegal -- he just doesn't think it should matter. This idea is completely antithetical to Thomas Paine's ideal that "in free countries the law ought to be king." If this is to be the new standard, if the executive branch is to be king, then we should enshrine it in the law -- because right now our laws say otherwise.

Indeed…also, the New York Times gets this (here today, responding to the inevitable outrage from you-know-who)…

In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

There it is – the rationale for an investigation leading to filing of charges and prosecution in a court of law.

So the answer to the question, Broder, at long last, is YES. I DO want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock.

Part of me understands full well why Broder continues to benefit from his “perch” amidst the beltway establishment, he being one of the keepers of the sacred “conventional wisdom.” But part of me wonders just how fouled, how polluted our media discourse, including on matters of politics, has become that someone like Broder can concoct this insult to common sense and still be taken seriously.

So with that in mind, let’s review some past Broder lowlights, shall we?

Here, he claimed he was getting “killed” with negative Email for a column about the marriage of the Clintons (the only episode where I can ever recall Broder spoke out against someone in power, and of course it had to be over a matter of such little consequence; Broder, let’s not forget, once claimed here that President Clinton “trashed the place”…as in Washington…”and it’s not his place,” a quote which revealed volumes about Broder’s sense of entitlement).

Here, he considered the matter of the outing of Valerie Plame to be “overblown” and claimed that Karl Rove was owed an apology for being cast as the leader of a “supposed plot to silence the opposition.”

Here, Broder wrote that “(concerning) the Iraq Study Group report being issued (in 2006), for the 10 commission members this was an exhilarating experience, a demonstration of genuine bipartisanship that they hope will serve as an example to the broader political world,” when in fact, as BriVt notes, “the Iraq Study Group didn't solve a goddamn thing.”

Oh, and lest we forget, “bipartisanship” trumps all in "Broder land," as noted here.

Here is one of the many “Bush Bounce” columns from Broder in hope of improving approval numbers for Dubya that, in the end, never materialized (of course, that was known well in advance by most life forms on this planet except Broder).

Broder blamed both Democrats AND Republicans equally here for the SCHIP fight about two years ago (call me crazy, but the Dems were the ones trying to wrench funding from the suddenly-frugal Repugs, which they were eventually able to do…of course, by then the “Party of No” had blown the budget “out of the water” from 2000-2006).

Here, Broder concocts a column about Hillary Clinton which, for my money, is nothing but an exercise in chauvinism (of course, it’s disguised as a commentary on “the state of the Clintons’ marriage – funny, but I haven’t read too many columns from Broder about the state of the Obamas’s marriage, or even the Bushs’s).

Here, Broder defends former Bushco HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt as “the man I got to know and admire in his years as governor of Utah and a leader in the National Governors Association,” even though Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services during Leavitt's tenure as governor was described as “reprehensible” (from 1993 to 1996, ten children who were under DCFS care died).

Here, Broder offered a crackpot history lesson on the 2000 presidential campaign, telling us that Al Gore’s convention speech was, "a request to step inside a seminar room, listen closely and take notes," adding, "Never has a candidate provided more detailed information on his autobiography and the program initiatives he plans. One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. ... [M]y, how he went on about what he wants to do as president. ... For all his Washington experience, Gore does not seem to have grasped Bush's point that a chief executive is smart to focus on a few key reforms, rather than dissipating his leadership on a crammed agenda."

And concerning Dubya at his “coronation,” Jamison Foser of Media Matters made the following observation…

Reading Broder's reaction to Bush's speech, you wouldn't have known whether Bush made mention of a single policy, proposal, or issue in his speech. You would, however, have learned that "Bush is seen by the public as a stronger leader -- and, by almost any measure, a man more likely to help cure the poisonous partisanship of the capital city."

With a superman like David Broder leading the fight for less substance and fewer details, nobody should have been surprised by Thursday night's Democratic debate, in which moderator Brian Williams asked candidates about haircuts and horse-race polls, and repeatedly dumbed down the debate with questions instructing the candidates to raise their hands in response, or to "say a name or to pass." No details, please -- our titans of journalism might nod off. Just raise your hand and move on.

Here, Broder called Harry Reid “the Democrats’ (Alberto) Gonzales” (there’s plenty of ammunition to go after Reid out there in the “reality-based community,” but that’s a rather laughable insult to hurl at the Senate Majority Leader).

And finally, Broder alleged here that Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to do anything substantive on the deficit because she wanted to score political points by protecting Social Security and Medicare, remembering how Dubya lost on trying to privatize Social Security (which was the result of people not trusting him more than anything else – took awhile for that to happen on something, but it finally did).

So in conclusion, it should be emphasized that Broder’s opposition today to the Holder investigation is totally in keeping his desire to “comfort the comfortable,” to twist the phrase of Finley Peter Dunne intended to describe the journalistic profession. However, the stakes in the Holder investigation are much higher than those of a typical bout of Broder voyeurism into the lives of the powerful over which he so abjectly fawns.

Once again, I give you the words of Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson…

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice.

And what a pity that our hopelessly compromised corporate media, personified by Broder, so utterly fails Jackson’s test of “detachment and intellectual integrity.”