Well, it’s started. Michael Barone has begun the rewriting of history. In one of the most dishonest columns I’ve seen in a long time, he attempts to deconstruct all the parallels between Vietnam and Watergate, and Iraq, Plamegate, and the NSA scandal.
In the process, he manages to blame the mainstream press for overcovering the criminal acts of Karl Rove while exonerating Rove of any crimes.
Specific to Plame, Barone makes two false claims.
Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely).
The law says a covert agent is one “who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States….” Apparently, Michael Barone cannot read. The ‘or’ is kind of clear, isn’t it? Valerie served overseas within the five year window, she just did not live overseas in the period. Barone is not a dunce, he’s a paid liar. That’s pretty clear from his second distortion. He says that it was not very likely that Rove knew Plame was undercover. I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
We get to the heart of Barone’s authoritarian worldview here:
Journalists in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.
I’ve written endlessly about the 1970’s during the Plame and NSA affairs precisely because the press has reverted to its prior form and so has the government. Washington reporters think the the blogosphere is undermining America’s faith in their institutions (the government and the press). They’re wringing their hands about it. I heard it first hand, from more than one reporter, in DC this week. We used to trust our institutions until we learned they were bugging our leaders, opening our mail, breaking into our psychiatrists offices, infiltrating our organizations and instigating violence, and lying about the reasons for and progress of a war. We trusted our papers until we realized they were deeply penetrated and compromised by the CIA. We tried to pass laws to give ourselves a renewed confidence in our institutions. And they have failed us again. Badly. At great cost in blood and treasure. Michael Barone is not a patriot. He is part of the problem. No amount of lies and distortions can give us back a sense of legitimacy in our press and our government. Only a long record of honest, competent, and legal performance can do that. We are not undermining the Establishment. We’re just documenting the atrocities.
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So it’s better to ignore uncomfortable truths in favor of supporting your local dictator. I suspect that real journalists might be troubled by this.
There is a whole school of thought in Washington that the country is better off if the American people have faith in their government and in the press. I can agree with that sentiment only in this sense: it would be better if they deserved that trust. But, in a world in which the government lies and the press aides and abets them more than they expose and contradict them, it is a dangerous thing for the American people to believe anything a government official or a reporter has to say.
The DC insider will counter that the more the press is undermined the easier it is for the government to ignore or lie to the press. That’s true. But, it’s not our fault for pointing out the shortcomings of the press. It is the government that is failing us, and the press is just collateral damage. They need to confront this government because they cannot continue to safeguard the legitimacy of a fraudulent government without becoming fraudulent themselves.
If it leads to fascism, the press has only themselves to blame. Not us.
We trusted our papers until we realized they were deeply penetrated and compromised by the CIA. We tried to pass laws to give ourselves a renewed confidence in our institutions. And they have failed us again. Badly.
My grandfather taught me not to trust authority when I was practically a toddler. But I first understood in my heart to be skeptical after the U-2 incident in 1960 when I was 14.
Subsequently, I read David Wise’s and Thomas Ross’s book The U-2 Affair, and then, in the spring of 1964, their book The Invisible Government, the first book to examine, however shallowly, the role of the CIA in overthrowing governments, among other misbehavior.
Like CIA Director John McCone, who tried to suppress that book, Barone belongs to that coterie of Americans which believes that the job of journalists is as lapdogs to authority not protectors of the people’s rights. Until the late ’60s, all but a few admirable exceptions among journalists felt they should be lapdogs, too, although they wouldn’t have called themselves that anymore than the vast number of “journalists” who are lapdogs today would adopt that description. It was only a few who took on “the Establishment.” Seymour Hersh, for instance, had a devil of a time getting his My-Lai massacre story published.
While the Bush Regime goes about trying to punish that minority of journalists who want to do the job the Constitution protects them for doing, Barone and others of his ilk seek to make lapdoggery the essence of patriotism. “Hack” is such a gentle epithet.
It’s a WSJ opinion piece. That means it’s already a given that it’s a lie. Marvel Comics has a better record of “honest reporting” than the WSJ editorial pages.
It’s only news if the WSJ breaks form and says somthing truthful in opinion pices and editorials it publishes.
when I first saw this piece I asked myself “who is Michael Barone and why should I care about his opinion”?
then I clicked the link and saw he was from WSJ, and I knew better than to waste time reading the manure.
I don’t think he is from the WSJ. Last I knew he was at USN&WR.
Great minds think alike! I posted a similar article on a different Michael Barone column here on Thursday:
http://tinyurl.com/qnusm
As for Barone’s “Journalists in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office”, well, he is unknowingly describing himself.
Other Barone doozies:
July 25, 2005
…Coverage of Bush during the 2004 campaign was heavily negative; for months the mainstream media mostly ignored the Swift Boat Vets’ charges against John Kerry and broadcast accusations against Bush based on forged documents eight weeks before the election…”
(just what universe does Barone exist in if he believes the mainstream media ingored the swiftobating of Kerry–in fact, they ate it up)
&
“…Now the unsupported charges that “Bush lied” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar…”
(Michael, back on the lithium, please)
May 15, 2006
“…All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise…”
(anyone who read Eric Alterman’s book “What Liberal Media,” chock full of documentation disproving Barone’s thesis, will see this the charade)
In fact, go to the following link for a grand list of Barone’s errors where you will see that Barone is the Dean of Hackology:
http://tinyurl.com/lw3ct