Bob Woodward is so butthurt that the Obama administration limited his access and made him irrelevant that he’s no longer making any pretense about political neutrality or journalistic objectivity. He’s gone at least half-Breitbart.
When it was conceived and enacted, the Sequester had two main objectives. The first was to bail Speaker Boehner out of a jam after he discovered to his dismay that this own caucus would not accept the deal he had negotiated with the White House. That meant that he had no plan for avoiding a default on our debt. He needed some trigger that would assure his mouth-breathers that actual cuts would eventually happen.
The second objective of the Sequester was to assure Democrats that actual revenue would eventually happen, and that is the reason that the Supercommittee was created. It’s job was to come up with a mix of spending cuts and new revenues. That was the entire point.
To say that the White House created the Sequester is narrowly true, but only because they had to find a way to avoid a default, and Boehner was out of ideas. It was his caucus that was forcing the default, so it is more accurate to say that the Republicans forced the White House to improvise, and the Sequester was their solution.
To say that Jack Lew told a falsehood to the Senate Finance Committee when he explained this, is journalistic malpractice on Woodward’s part.
To accuse the president of shifting the goal posts by asking for revenue is to contradict Woodward’s own previous reporting, and even the internal logic of last night’s piece.
All this does is prove the White House prescient when they decided to treat Woodward like any other journalist rather than some kind of saint.
Woodward has been an intelligence asset since well before Watergate. All his writing is fit only for figuring out what some portion of the PermaGov intelligence services wants to see happen. He’s like the spring groundhog. Wherever his shadow appears, that’s what the more…repressive…intelligence forces want.
Over and out…
AG
It’s true that Woodward’s reputation was built on the notion that he used his role as a journalist to challenge those in power. But if you view the Watergate scandal as a episode in a contest between powerful factions, Woodward’s part appears in a different light: Not speaking truth to power, so much as choosing sides in an intrigue.
Absolutely.
Even further…bought and sold as early as his Yale days.
Go read this: Bob Woodward…ALL smoke and mirrors?
A remnant of my days on Daily Kos before Kos accepted his own place in the daily PermaGov hustle.
Some excerpts?
Sure.
6/2/2005. Nothing has changed in almost eight years except some of the the cast. Same movie, same plot. Like I said and continue to say…wake the fuck up.
Station WTFU signing off.
Once again.
Sigh.
Later…
AG
P.S. I’ll be baaaaack…
Bet on it.
“Nothing is real” Lennon
Bet on it.
AG
Office of Naval Intelligence. He even admitted that he first met Mark “Deep Throat” Felt in the basement of the White House when he was carrying a briefcase of top secret stuff from the Pentagon.
A quick review of his career shows a lot of little lies in the service of the invisible government in place since 1963.
You underestimate the span of the invisible government. Long before 1963.
But 1963 was when they won, Tarheel.
“Bada-BING!!!” as they say.
When the PermaGov realized that it could indeed get away with murder followed by a Warren Commission-style coverup…why. that’s all she wrote, big fella!!!
Fast forward through any number of highly suspicious deaths and what do you have?
The U.S., circa 2013
Bet on it.
AG
If all one knew about the sequester was what was gleaned by reading that Woodward article, you would come to the conclusion that the sequester decision was made in complete isolation, irrespective of any other events that were going on at the time. The fact that it was inextricably intertwined with the discussions surrounding the very real potential for a default by the U.S., solely because of the pure Tea Party obstinance of the GOP, is not presented anywhere in Woodward’s article.
Woodward a piece of shit? I think you are being too kind.
Yep. In a sane world, every.single.article or segment about the sequester would include an introductory disclaimer setting forth certain important things about its origin:
In a truly ideal world, there would also be an appendix noting:
I mean, at least the first few of those points should accompany any piece about the politics or gamesmanship of the sequester. But…no. Of course not. Both sides do it.
It’s just…depressing. And exhausting.
The Woodward clan have been resting on their laurels for a very long time while a younger, leaner, tenacious gaggle of reporter/pundits have been running circles around them.
Your post on Ezra vs Brooks yesterday and then watching Ezra expand on his takedown as a standin for O’Donnell last night sharpened the differences.
Where’s the relevance of Wolf Blizer when you can get a complete picture from Rachel? The older crowd are still willing to let the spinners spin vs a Chris Hayes or Alex Wagner first (as well as the underappreciated Tamara Hall) response is whoa, here’s the facts.
The older guys play to the money the controversy will pay them; the younger crowd understands the longer term value of digging for answers.
It happens in cycles, because real journalism is a young person’s game. It requires endless hours of digging and research and interviewing and re-interviewing:
Time was, Bobby and Carl were the hungry young ‘uns. But Woodward has never understood that he had the one great story of a lifetime, and so for 40 years he’s been rewriting the same thing. Or trying to.
What I used to hear is that Bernstein was really the brains of that operation, but Woodward got played by Redford in the movie, so QED.
Read Russ Baker’s chapters on Watergate from “Family Of Secrets”. In his condemnation of the Bush Family he probably exaggerates their importance, but I think it’s a closer take to reality than the praise and flower petals that Woodward has been resting on for decades. Woodward was just another player in the show.
Yep.
It would seem he is old and tired and lazy.
Or he is so determined to be his own man and stand out from all other reporting that he is actually seeing things in the facts that are not there.
Sad either way.
All this does is prove the White House prescient when they decided to treat Woodward like any other journalist rather than some kind of saint.
So why did they ever treat a circus clown like “Bobo” Brooks as a serious journalist?
Journalism is not a profitable business in the 21st Century. Entertainment, however, has a very large margin…
I was sort of listening to the evening news yesterday on NPR. Then the chirpy news reader announced that there would be a serious discussion of events — which turned out to be a lead-in for E.J. Dionne and Brooks, “our regular commentators.”
At which point, I turned off the radio and remembered why I no longer donate to NPR for news, only for local.
Thought about writing them to suggest they have some real discussion of news, but you never get a response, and they don’t change.
Unfortunately, if you want even a smidgen of news without bible-thumping, they’re pretty much the only radio source lately. But I draw the line at listening to an idjut like Brooks, who is not a journalist and not even a good opinion columnist. Nearly as I can tell, he seems to be a holdover from the days of Abe I’m Writing As Bad As I Can Rosenthal.
/grumpy
Woodward epitomizes everything wrong with a certain, highly prevalent strain of Beltway “journalism,” one that sees access as its own end and a more important commodity than truth or facts. Woodward has spent the last couple decades as the faithful, unquestioning stenographer of power.
That’s pretty common now, but it takes an ego of Woodward’s Hindenbergian proportions to also play the reverse game: punishing a newsmaker – in this case the POTUS! – for not allowing him to do his fawning stenography kabuki. In a professional niche crawling with narcissistic hacks, Woodward is the narcissisiest and hackiest. Good on the Obama folks for treating him with the exact level of respect he’s earned.
My understanding is that the sequence of events is complicated and goes something like this:
You don’t go back far enough:
…and now we get to your timeline. There are some unforced errors in there on the part of the administration.
To say that the White House created the Sequester is narrowly true…
Steve Benen has made a good point a couple of times about this whole discussion of whose idea the sequester was to begin with: Who cares? The sequester is upon us, and one party is trying to do something about it and the other party isn’t.
On the other hand, to the extent that it is important to know who to blame for the sequester, it’s worth noting that Barack Obama doesn’t have a vote in the House of Representatives.
http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/073105.htm
what the bloody hell?
Jesus, what a douche.
The Bush administration outing a covert CIA agent as part of reckless juvenile retribution for being caught peddling bullshit to start a war = oh, that’s just an opportunity! No harm no foul.
Obama refusing to allow the braindead GOP House of Representatives to dictate the presidential agenda two months after a convincing reelection victory = Obama is a huge meanie! How dare he!
What a fucking douche.
It seems that Obama should have let the debt ceiling fall and then waited for Wall Street to scream at their Republican stooges to remember who their true masters are.
To say that the White House created the Sequester is narrowly true, but
So they piss on Obama for not unilaterally offering compromises to extreme extremists who own the GOP … but when he does offer one they blame him for it.
By “they” I mean the consensus Washington punditry. Consensus usually implies centrist -but measured by the world standard Washington punditry is far to the right of anything rational.
Quondam liberal hero, out in the cold.