St. Helen

I've been struggling, as perhaps many of us have, to process and deal with the ongoing stonewalling and obstruction of the law in connection with the obvious criminality that is increasingly becoming the trademark of the Bush "white " house. The dickhead has obviously spotted and exploited major weaknesses in the system, at least when there are enablers in the legislative branch (limp-wristed Dems and Joe Lieberman, we know where you live and will be not voted for!), not to mention the media, formerly counted on to ask tough questions and resist sycophantism. These days Helen Thomas is out there pretty much on her own from what I can tell.

Speaking of which, Mr. Greenwald found an opportunity to interview the very same Ms. Thomas, a truly admirable character in the Fourth Estate these days. One of the incredible percs of being an avid blogospheric is to have access to this sort of stuff. On the offchance you are not out there with quite the same zeal as I, let me share. And, yes, that is my dungbeetle stand-in for the dickubus, rolling his shit endlessly.

But try this for folks on a higher plane, interested in actually pursuing the proper aims of the USA, being true patriots, and not merely in it for personal gain like the present swine:

Last Thursday, I wrote about an acrimonious exchange at the White House press gaggle between Helen Thomas and Tony Snow regarding the number of Iraqis who have been killed during the war. Thomas relentlessly challenged the administration's tactic of labelling everyone killed in Iraq a "terrorist," and demanded to know how many Iraqi civilians had been killed during the four-year-and-counting war. Snow claimed he did not know the answer because the U.S does not "track" that information.

About that exchange, I wrote: "It is unnecessary to identify the reporter asking these questions because there is really only one White House correspondent who would." Several commenters suggested an interview with Thomas, and following up on those suggestions, I interviewed Thomas this morning regarding the state of modern journalism, the Bush administration and related issues.

Following is a verbatim transcript of that interview, edited solely for length:

GG: You have covered every President since John Kennedy. I wanted to ask if you could identify how the White House press corps has changed over time, if it has, and what differences are there in terms of how journalists cover presidents?

HT: Well, that's a big order. But I do think that in the good olden days, reporters were really straight reporters. I worked for a wire service, UPI, for 57 years, and I covered the White House for UPI from the 70s onto Bush, and then became a columnist. So I certainly know both sides.

As a wire service reporter, I played it straight, with the facts, which is absolutely required of a wire service reporter. But that doesn't mean I bowed out of the human race. I permitted myself to think, to care, to believe, but it didn't get in my copy.

I did think that tough questions were always very important. With Kennedy, we knew he enjoyed the banter with the press, and he had the first live televised news conferences. And it made a big difference in terms of really capturing the imagination of the public. It was the first time they really saw reporters in action, they saw a witty president that was able to dodge questions as deftly as anyone, and he had great eloquence. That was the first time the American people really became interested in presidential news conferences.

And then Johnson had a love-hate relationship with the press. He couldn't live without us, and yet at the same time, he thought we were hurting him every day. The words "credibility gap" were created in that era.

With Nixon, that is when news management and manipulation really began. Now, every president wants to put his best foot forward, and always be able to manage and manipulate news coverage.

All presidential candidates, especially, vow to run an open administration. But they step foot in the Oval Office and the Iron Curtain slams down. Suddenly, all information that I think belongs in the public domain becomes their private preserve.

The manipulation of the press has become greater and greater. This is the most secretive administration I have ever covered. And they're all secretive.

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News Flash: Great WP Series on "The Angler - the Cheney Vice Presidency"

On the offchance you have not already come upon the series the Washington Post started on Sunday (6/24/07), I strongly encourage you to at least skim the material. Hopefully it will help all of us maintain a proper sense of outrage over the appalling arrogance and anti-democratic spirit that seem to be the primary motivating principles behind Dick Cheney.

I'm borrowing here from Froomkin's White House Watch:

Midway through a massive and momentous Washington Post series on Vice President Cheney, it's clearer than ever that one thing missing from Cheney's worldview is any appreciation for checks and balances -- not just among the three branches of government, but also within his own.

Please go read parts one and two of this important series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, then come back. Gellman's narrated photo gallery works as a pithy overview.

Sunday's installment depicts Cheney as the guiding force behind the most radical elements of the Bush presidency. Today's installment describes Cheney's responsibility for the administration's torture policies in particular. Tomorrow's will focus on his influence on economic policy, and Wednesday's will detail his impact on environmental policy.

Gellman and Becker write that "Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore." Yet in most decisions Gellman and Becker describe, President Bush's role is essentially to sign whatever Cheney has put in front of him. The series offers ample evidence that within the Bush administration, dissenters from Cheney's views are bullied, marginalized or fired -- with apparently no effective pushback from Bush or any of his other top aides. It's a stunning portrait.

The series is invaluable in providing concrete examples of the enormous and influential role that Cheney has long been suspected of playing in this White House. But given all that's transpired in the last year or so, it seems inconceivable that Cheney still wields as much influence as he once did. What I'm most curious about right now is whether, or how, Cheney's grip is slipping.

Outside the White House, Cheney's credibility is now almost zero, due to his errors of judgment on Iraq and his nearly delusional assertions about the war, as well as the cloud over his own conduct raised by the conviction of his former chief of staff for perjury.

But is his credibility still intact inside the Bush bubble? Is he still the last one to talk to Bush before the president makes a decision? Is the Cheney machine -- a legion of loyalists in key positions throughout government, transmitting information to and orders from the vice president's office -- still functioning effectively?

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The start of that fourth 'graph seems to attempt to soften the otherwise almost constantly malevolent and certainly malignant quality that hangs in the air whenever the Dickubus staggers out into the light.

In fact, with little trouble you can find a good deal of speculation in the world of Real News (i.e. out here away from the tube and print!) to the effect that this WP series was probably ready weeks ago and that it was stalled by the same management at that paper that leave it less than credible and in tatters for reputation these days. There is highly credible speculation that the series was finally rushed to print with some pastiche-work like the subject of this 'graph crudely done in an attempt to dilute the absolutely damning (i.e., accurate) portrait of this Machiavellian would-be destroyer of Democracy. Try Talking Points Memo, Firedoglake, or NextHurrah, for some truth serum on that.

But by all means check out the Post series in toto. Apparently there are two more in the series due this week.

Tragic Indeed

There's a wonderfully big buzz about Glenn Greenwald's new book "A Tragic Legacy" (officially releasing Tuesday, as I hear it, though Amazon claims my order has already been shipped).

Firedoglake had the honor of hosting Glenn today in their Book Salon. The exchanges between author and audience, even to the limited extent I surfed them, were terrific. I strongly encourage you to ramble through the comments!

Digby (yes, that Digby) took charge of introducing GG at the site. This is the Blogger who was very properly awarded last week for her great work in doing actual Journalism in an era when Big Business and the Monopolistic Media have fought hard to eliminate the "Izzy" style of independent un-bribed reporting and decided news will be what they tell us, e.g through the columns of folks like Ms. Miller (former NYT) and the ongoing sycophantism of shills (and so-far un-indicted potential felons) like Russert and Matthews. Those who have any intention of actually wanting to grapple with information (versus spin) must at least consider exploring elsewhere.

Digby's award, as you may be aware, took place at the Take Back America conference last week. It engendered a quite remarkable speech. I hope you had a chance to appreciate it. In the interest of brevity I have only the start of Digby's intro to the Greenwald thread at FDL here, admittedly only a teaser:

After 9/11, I remember being quite surprised that the US government would so freely use the phrase “good and evil” when our attackers had been extreme religious fanatics. Laden as those words are with religious association, it seemed to me to be fanning the flames when a smarter approach would have been to distance ourselves from such rhetoric and try to redirect the focus to more rational ground. I did a post quite early on in which I compared speeches by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in which their frequent references to God and good and evil and satan were nearly indistinguishable. Both speeches could have come right out of the 13th century. (It was one of the creepiest posts I ever did, and I recall that at the time we were in the grip of such paranoia, I wondered if I would gather the attention of the authorities for writing such a thing.)

From very early on Bush used archaic religious verbal constructions like “the evil ones” and “evil-doers.” Perhaps the most startling example is what he reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mamhoud Abbas in 2003: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” Yikes.

It turns out that anachronistic verbiage was much more than boneheaded rhetoric. As Glenn Greenwald convincingly lays out in devastating detail in his new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency”, this war between “good ‘n evil” became the all-purpose justification for the lawless usurpation of the bedrock values of our constitution. From the extended excerpt in Salon Magazine:

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