David Broder and Media Culpability for Bush Crimes

I read David Broder's truly wretched screed
yesterday -- in which he demands immunity for Bush officials from
investigation and prosecution and attacks those who advocate
accountability -- and decided that I wouldn't write about it until
today because I didn't want it to infect my Saturday.

I read David Broder's truly wretched screed
yesterday -- in which he demands immunity for Bush officials from
investigation and prosecution and attacks those who advocate
accountability -- and decided that I wouldn't write about it until
today because I didn't want it to infect my Saturday. For purposes of
catharsis, I did immediately note on Twitter that Broder's article was "a tour de force of Beltway sickness - even for him" and that "the Washington press corps has exactly the 'dean' it deserves." Fortunately, Hilzoy, Scott Lemieux and Roger Ailes -- among others
-- have now made most of the points quite conclusively that need to be
made about the morally depraved joke that David Broder is, leaving just
a couple of observations worth noting.

To justify the absolute immunity he wants for government lawbreakers, Broder describes the Bush era as "one of the darkest chapters of American history,
when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and
subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes
of extracting information about threats to the United States." But
that's easy to say now that the Bush presidency is over and the
evidence of its criminality so undeniable. But Broder never said any such thing
while it was all taking place, when it mattered. In fact, he did the
opposite: he mocked those who tried to sound the alarm about how
radical and "dark" the Bush presidency was and repeatedly defended what
Bush officials were doing as perfectly normal, unalarming and well
within the bounds of mainstream and legitimate policy.

As but one example, Broder -- in a September 15, 2006 Washington Post chat -- was asked by a reader about an Editorial in The New York Times which appeared that morning
that warned of the grave dangers of abolishing habeas corpus and the
protections of the Geneva Conventions, as the soon-to-be-enacted
Military Commissions Act sought to do. In other words, back then, the Times
Editorial Page was warning of exactly the policies -- "certain
terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to
waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion" -- which Broder
today, with Bush safely gone, cites as examples of our "darkest
chapter." Yet here is what Broder was saying about these things when
it mattered:

Kingston, Ontario:
I'm rather surprised by your and your correspondents' calm tone of
voice this morning. Unless the New York Times editorial page is wildly
off-track, the U.S. is in the grip of a major constitutional crisis,
with the government trying to set aside long established guarantees of
legal behavior, both internally and in relation to international law.
Where's the sense of urgency?

David S. Broder: Far be it from me to question the New York Times, but I'd like to assure you that Washington is calm and quiet this morning, and democracy still lives here. Editorial writers sometimes get carried away by their own rhetoric.

On other occasions,
Broder mocked those who suggested there was anything extremist or
radical about Bush's "counter-terrorism" policies; hailed "Bush's
conviction that the quest for freedom is a universal truth"; proclaimed
his confidence in Donald Rumsfeld's pre-war Iraq plans; and compared
2002 war opponents to "Jane Fonda in Hanoi or antiwar protesters
marching under Viet Cong flags."

Just compare what Broder wrote about the Bush presidency on November 14, 2004, to what he wrote today:

11/14/2004:

Some of my colleagues in the pundit business have become unhinged by the election results. The always diverting Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote the other day that "the forces of darkness" are taking over the country . . . Bush won, but he will have to work within the system for whatever he gets. Checks and balances are still there. The nation does not face "another dark age," unless you consider politics with all its tradeoffs and bargaining a black art.

Today:

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history,
when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and
subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes
of extracting information about threats to the United States.

What Broder states today as fact (that the Bush presidency is "one of the darkest chapters of American history") is almost verbatim
that which, when it mattered, when it was happening, he vehemently and
repeatedly denied -- and, of course, given that he works in the most
accountability-free profession of all (establishment punditry), he does
not even have the minimal honesty to acknowledge that. Like so many of
his colleagues, Broder played a critical role in defending these crimes
and insisting that they were not taking place.

This is a crucial
and oft-overlooked fact in the debate over whether we should
investigate and prosecute Bush crimes. The very same pundits and
establishment journalists who today are demanding that we forget all
about it, not look back, not hold anyone accountable, are the very same people who -- like Broder -- played key roles in hiding, enabling and defending these crimes.
In light of that, what is less surprising than the fact that, almost
unanimously, these very same people oppose any efforts to examine what
happened and impose accountability? Back in January, I wrote the following about the virtual unanimity among establishment media figures against investigations and prosecutions:

Bush officials didn't commit these crimes by themselves. Virtually the entire Washington establishment supported or at least enabled most of it.
. . . As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential
lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition,
"black site" prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other
dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very
few of them with any significant platform can point to anything they
did or said to oppose or stop any of it -- and they know that.

Many
of them, even when much of this became conclusively proven, were still
explicitly praising Bush officials. Most of them supported the
underlying enabling policies (Guantanamo and the permanent state of war
in Iraq and "on terror"), and then cheered on laws -- the Military
Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act -- designed to legalize
these activities and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers and war
criminals from prosecution.

So when these media and
political elites are defending Bush officials, mitigating their crimes,
and arguing that they shouldn't be held accountable, they're actually
defending themselves.
. . . They can't indict Bush officials
for what they did because to do so would be to indict themselves. Bush
officials need to be exonerated, or at least have their crimes
forgotten (look to the future and ignore the past, they all chime in
unison), so that their own involvement in it will also be cleansed and
then forgotten.

Earlier this week, Paul Krugman made a similar point:

One
addendum to today's column: the truth, which I think everyone in the
political/media establishments knows in their hearts, is that the nine
months or so between the summer of 2002 and the beginning of the Iraq
insurgency were a great national moral test - a test that most people
in influential positions failed. . . . But for those who stayed
"sensible" through the test, it's a moment they'd like to see forgotten. That, I believe, is the real reason so many want to let torture and everything else go down the memory hole.

Imagine
if a police officer were stationed in front of the hospital room of a
key witness in a criminal trial, in order to protect the witness from
attack, but instead, the officer fell asleep or wondered off to watch
TV and, as a result, the defendant's associates were able to enter the
room and murder the witness. Asking establishment journalists if they
favor investigations and prosecutions of Bush crimes is like asking
that police officer whether he favors an investigation and consequences
for what happened or whether he instead prefers that the whole thing
just be forgotten and everyone look instead to the future. People who
bear culpability in the commission of destructive and criminal acts
always oppose investigations and accountability -- i.e., what
they'll call "looking backwards" or "retribution." They're the last
people whose opinions we ought to be seeking on that question.

* * * * *

Directly contrary to the way the establishment media is describing these facts, polling data has consistently shown that large majorities of Americans favor investigations into Bush crimes and large percentages favor criminal prosecutions. Even with virtually the entire pundit class united in opposition, yet another poll on that question -- from The Washington Post/ABC News today -- finds that a majority (51-47%) answered "yes"
when asked: "Do you think the Obama administration should or should
not investigate whether any laws were broken in the way terrorism
suspects were treated under the Bush administration?" It's amazing how
much The Hard Left has grown.

* * * * *

More than anything
else, Broder's column illustrates the Central Creed of Beltway Culture,
which should be memorialized on plaques throughout that city:


When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice.


When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.

* * * * *

See also: this post from earlier today on Time Magazine's coverage of drug decriminalization in Portugal and this post on one of the most brazen acknowledgments yet that most establishment journalists operate with no standards.

UPDATE: For
a perfect example of how etablishment journalists and pundits --
including our ostensibly "liberal" ones -- cheered on many of these
crimes, see Digby.

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