As I'm sure you're all aware, over the past few days right wing blogs, the mainstream media, Republican politicians, and even the Bush administration itself have been going bonkers over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria.
Never mind that Pelosi was traveling with both Republicans and Democrats. Never mind that she made her trip after a previous Republican led delegation had just completed their visit. Never mind that she was thoroughly briefed by the State Department before she left. Never mind that former Speaker of the House Hastert frequently traveled abroad to openly criticize President Clinton. Never mind that even the Republicans who travelled with Pelosi have said publicly that, unlike Hastert, she refrained from attacking the president during any of their meetings with Syrian leaders.
Never mind all of that. The attacks, it seems, will continue. Here's the latest brilliant effort, for example, from Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH):
"It's one thing for other members to go," Boehner said, "but you have to ask yourself, 'Why is Pelosi going?' She's going for one reason and that is to embarrass the president. She is the speaker of the House. She's giving (the Syrian) government more credit than they deserve. They sponsor terrorism. They have not been at all helpful. I wish she wasn't there."
Notice that Boehner is suggesting that while it is OK for regular congresspeople to go to Syria, its a problem when the Speaker of the House does it. Which makes sense because... well, I have absolutely no idea why it makes sense. So far as I can tell, there's no record of Republicans criticizing Speaker Hastert when he engaged in such behavior a few years back. Why not?
Then again, I suppose Boehner was just parroting what Cheney had said a few days back:
In an interview with ABC News, Cheney said Assad has "been isolated and cut off because of his bad behavior and the unfortunate thing about the speaker's visit is it sort of breaks down that barrier.""It means without him having done any of those things he should do in order to be acceptable, if you will, from an international standpoint, he gets a visit from a high-ranking American anyway," Cheney said.
Cheney had grounded Syria, taken away their phone privileges, and sent them to their room. How dare Pelosi undermine his authority! Now the Syrians will know that they can behave badly without consequence. My goodness!
Although Republican congressional leadership seems to be standing with Cheney on this one, it appears that many Republican members of congress have had enough.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is traveling in Syria today, and like Pelosi's group he is meeting directly with Syrian President Bashar Assad. Amazingly, he's also openly criticizing the president while he is there:
Commenting on Bush’s criticism, California Republican Darrell Issa said the president had failed to promote the necessary dialogue to resolve disagreements between the U.S. and Syria.
“That’s an important message to realize: We have tensions, but we have two functioning embassies,” Issa told reporters after separate meetings with Assad and his foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem.
Now, lest you think Issa is some sort of stand-up guy, its worth nothing that he has decided to hide behind Speaker Pelosi's skirt while making his comments. ThinkProgress:
ThinkProgress contacted Issa’s press office for comment. A spokesman signaled Issa may defend the trip by claiming it was Pelosi — not him — who “broke the embargo” of meeting with Syrian officials.
That's brilliant. The man makes the choice to go to Syria, but rather than stand up for himself, he decides instead to deflect criticism onto someone else. Apparently Issa, like everyone else, doesn't realize that Pelosi's delegation traveled to Syria after one led by Republican members of Congress. From the International Herald Tribune:
Pelosi's visit followed one by three congressmen from Bush's own party who also met with Syria's leaders.
"I don't care what the administration says on this. You gotta do what you think is in the best interest of your country," said Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, who was part of the delegation.
In the end, the thing that baffles me the most about all of this is the apparent inability of all of the people involved to recognize the way their media universe has changed. Once upon a time, it really wasn't that difficult to build a political career based on your ability to tell small but believable lies about the world around you. Databases like Lexis-Nexis started to change that, but it wasn't until Google that lying really became problematic. For example, prior to the age of the Internet, imagine how difficult it would have been to go back and find out what previous Speakers had done and said. For the average citizen, it wouldn't have just been difficult. It would have been virtually impossible.
Amazingly, it isn't just politicians who seem unaware of the power of, as our president once called it, "the Google." Even members of the media seem largely ignorant of the way the Internet can be used to fact check stories.
Take ABC News, for example. Today Glenn Greenwald has engaged in a fascinating exchange with Jeffrey Schneider, Senior Vice President of ABC News. Schneider is upset that Greenwald has spent the past few days attacking a story ABC recently ran about Iran's nuclear program. Based entirely on unnamed anonymous sources, the story claimed that Iran's nuclear program was advancing rapidly towards the production of a bomb. Greenwald's criticism was that, given the track record of the media in the run up to the Iraq War, news organizations need to be far more cautious in reporting stories that seem to parrot the most spectacular claims made by the administration. Schnedier counters by suggesting that ABC News is a fantastically professional news organization, and that as such, the story should be trusted because ABC News can be trusted.
What's striking about this "trust us, we're ABC News" argument it that it was both inevitable and entirely predictable that it would be torn to shreds in just a few short hours by progressive bloggers. Atrios started things off with a series of direct quotes from the ABC News coverage of the Jessica Lynch affair. Next came a list of many of the false claims made by ABC prior to the war in Iraq. And then, a quote from back in 2001 from the very same investigative reporter involved in this week's story. My guess is that it will go on like this all day.
Again, what's striking is that even the Senior VP of ABC News doesn't seem to have a clue about how things have changed. In the past, journalists could make mistakes, sometimes even big ones, and they would largely be forgotten. But those days are over. Thanks to Google, their mistakes will never disappear. A statement like "trust us, we're ABC, we don't make big mistakes" won't fly anymore because it is now simply too easy to disprove.
As Greenwald says,
Journalists find any criticisms based on that lack of trust to be "outrageous," because they think they've done nothing to deserve it. They see themselves as trustworthy and solid professionals with a record that merits great respect and faith. After all, they win Peabody Awards. Their failure to recognize just how fundamentally broken their profession has become -- and how little faith so many people have in it -- explains, more than anything else, why they are not really changing how they operate. It also explains why they are incapable of understanding criticisms of this sort as anything other than outrageous (or "partisan-motivated") slander.
Eventually, all this has to change. If nothing else, eventually Baby Boomer journalists will be replaced by journalists who are members of younger generations for whom the implications of Google are simply self-evident. My hope is that this will happen sooner rather than later; my fear is that it will not.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
