George Bush Sr. fired Karl Rove in 1992 for planting a negative story with columnist Robert Novak. If you are doing a double take, just read the sentence again. History repeats doesn’t it? Read the full, original tale as told by Ron Suskind in Esquire, back in Janurary 2003, at the wayback machine.
Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism
It was… Novak?
The AP is saying Bob Novak told Karl Rove about Valerie Plame, who then passed it on to other journalists. So who told Novak? via Metafilter.
Interesting
It’s MIT’s Fault
The Boston Globe: In sanctum Santorum:
Today, I’d like to take a few moments to express profound thanks to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the US Senate. In fact, all Bostonians should thank him for sharing his incredible wisdom and insight about this city and its depraved ways.
Specifically, here’s what Santorum wrote about the church pedophile scandal on a religious website called Catholic Online. ”When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
So thank you, senator, for setting us straight about the problems with the clergy. Thank you for letting us know that all those pedophilic priests and the church leaders who covered up their crimes are the fault of every Bostonian.
…I asked a Santorum spokesman whether the senator still believed what he said about Boston. I mean, guilt might be our greatest natural resource, but do we really have to fall on our collective sword over wayward priests?
“It’s an open secret that you have Harvard University and MIT that tend to tilt to the left in terms of academic biases,” said Robert Traynham, the Santorum aide. “I think that’s what the senator was speaking to.”
Of course. The whole thing is MIT’s fault.
Media Prediction on Rove
On news that Bush’s personal credibility rating with the American public is falling, I bet that “leaks” from the Whitehouse, on who they plan to nominate, will move Rove from featuring prominently in the news. Push it right off the map. Bush Co. is very good at changing the subject.
Actually, this prediction comes from a friend – he doesn’t have a blog – so I claim the prediction 🙂
In related matters: BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis:
…Now the question remains whether I care. Sorry, but if I went to a party and heard one group dissecting Plame/Rove and another group dissecting War of the Worlds, I’d join the latter conversation. In a blog, it’s hard to feign interest.
Parsing that raises interesting questions.
Instapundit strangely quiet: Tony Pierce calls Glenn Reynolds out
how ironic that our pal the instapundit would have the cajones to post that something was underreported when he has been noticeably quiet about karl rove (who has also been suddenly silent) and TreasonGate.
is part of the lack of Instapundit coverage due to the fact that he called it officially bogus in December of ’03?
but i guess that was a lie since i clearly remember about a dozen or more anti-Joe Wilson posts last year at this time. lets count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
my bad.
so from june 27 through august 5, a period of about a month and a half, the instapundit laid into joe wilson nearly four dozen times.
saying things like joe wilson lied, reputations died and quoting lefty heavyweight Atrios(!) via Tom McGuire by saying “If a source lies to you, and you find it out, you burn him. Period.” he even went on the Hugh Hewitt show to diss wilson on the radio
so fine professor, either Scott McClellon lied
or Rove lied to Scotty when the Press Secretary told reporters that Rove had nothing to do with leaking the story about Wilson’s wife being CIA. we have all found out, so will you “burn” Scotty or Rove the way you tried to throttle Wilson last summer?
Wow – journalists standing up to the Whitehouse?
EdCone.com: “The sharks were circling White House spokesunit Scott McClellan today.”:
QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you’re going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you’ve decided not to talk. You’ve got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?
MCCLELLAN: I’m well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation…
QUESTION: (inaudible) when it’s appropriate and when it’s inappropriate?
MCCLELLAN: If you’ll let me finish.
QUESTION: No, you’re not finishing. You’re not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?
MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.
A Journalist Who Thinks Judy Miller Should Go to Jail
Attytood: Why this journalist thinks that Judy Miller should go to jail
…what if the “source” that Miller (and Cooper) have been protecting may have committed a serious crime, naming an undercover CIA agent and possibly even exposing her to fatal consequences, as happened when American spies were “outed” in the 1970s. In the “slippery slope” argument, those facts are irrelevant. If Judy Miller goes to jail today, under this thinking, it makes it more likely for a good and honest journalist who’s on the brink of exposing true corruption to be jailed tomorrow.
Today, we realized that the “slippery slope” argument is wrong, and so were we. We’re not happy that Judy Miller is going to jail, but we think — in this case — that if she won’t cooperate with the grand jury, then it’s the right thing.
That’s because Judy Miller’s actions in recent years — a pattern that includes this case — have been the very antithesis of what we think journalism is and should be all about. Ultimately, the heart and soul of real journalism is not so much protecting “sources” at any cost. It is, rather, living up to the 19th Century maxim set forth by Peter Finley Dunne, that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
That is why the ability of reporters to keep the identity of their true sources confidential is protected by shield laws in 31 states and the District of Columbia (although not in federal courts). Without such protections, the government official would not be able to report the wrongdoing of a president (remember “Deep Throat,” the ultimate confidential source?), nor would the corporate executive feel free to rat out a crooked CEO. The comfortable and corrupt could not be afflicted.
But the Times’ Judy Miller has not been afflicting the comfortable. She has been protecting them, advancing their objectives, and helping them to mislead a now very afflicted American public. In fact, thinking again about Watergate and Deep Throat is a good way to understand why Judy Miller should not be protected today. Because in Watergate, a reporter acting like Miller would not be meeting the FBI’s Mark Felt in an underground parking garage. She would be obsessively on the phone with H.R. Haldeman or John Dean, listening to malicious gossip about Carl Bernstein or their plans to make Judge Sirica look bad.
“Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality – no one in America is”
So says Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigating the Valerie Plame identity leak affair.
For my friends who have no idea what this is about. A quick review.
1. Joseph C.Wilson was a U.S. ambassador assigned to investigate Iraq-Niger WMD production claims. He reported he found none. When President Bush, later in his State of the Union address claimed there were, Wilson went public.
2. Shortly after, his wife Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, had her identity leaked to CNN personality Robert Novak – who revealed it in a newspaper column. It is believed that the revealing of her identity was in retaliation for his going public.
3. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is illegal. An investigation has begun into who leaked her identity to Novak and to other journalists across the country, notably Judy Miller at the New York Times and Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper.
4. Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper has helped reveal his source as George Bush’s primary politcal advisor Karl Rove. Judy Miller, refusing to reveal her source, and has since been sent to jail. Article at the Guardian.
Jay Rosen thinks it’s Time for Robert Novak to Feel Some Chill
I, for one, have had it with Robert Novak. And if all the journalists who are talking today about “chilling effects” and individual conscience mean what they say, they will, as a matter of conscience and pride, start giving Novak himself the big chill.
That means if you’re a Washington columnist maybe you don’t go on CNN with him– until he explains. If you’re a newspaper editor you consider suspending his column until he explains. If you’re Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, you take him off the air until he decides to go on the air and explain. If you’re John Barron, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, you suspend your columnist (with pay, I should think); and if Barron won’t do it then publisher John Cruickshank should.
If Novak says he can’t talk until the case is over, then he shouldn’t be allowed to publish or opine on the air until the case is over. He should know the rage some of his colleagues feel. Claiming to be “baffled” by Novak’s behavior may have been plausible for a while. With reporter Judith Miller now sitting in jail, and possibly facing criminal charges later, “baffled” is sounding lame.
After the decision yesterday someone asked Bill Keller, top editor of the New York Times, if this was really a whistle-blowing case. Keller answered: “you go to court with the case you’ve got.” I understood what he meant, but that answer was incomplete.
For in certain ways the case that sent Judy Miller to jail is about a classic whistler blower: diplomat Joseph C. Wilson. Those “two senior administration officials” in Novak’s column had a message for him: stick your neck out and we’ll stick it to your wife. (They did: her career as an operative is over.) Might that have some chilling effect?
For more on the consequences of Mathew Cooper revealing his sources read this commentary. via dangerousmeta.
Reading “Free Culture”
I have finally gotten around to reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and was struck, considering the events in London of the past few days, by the following:
When two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching.
These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was “balance”, and seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, “news as entertainment”, even if the entertainment is tragedy.
But in addition to this produced news about the “tragedy of September 11,” those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book Cyber Rights, around a news event that had captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet.
I don’t mean simply to praise the Internet – though I do think the people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the “Just Think!” bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text.
But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition – not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.
The book is over a year old. Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do. The net is providing new tools to do so.
Rev. Fred Phelps: “Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today”
I’m sorry to link to this – but the only way to respond to hatred is to expose it to as many as possible.
Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today – July 7, 2005 – wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more. “But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction; truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth.” Jer. 7:28. England: Island of the Sodomite Damned
via: Think Progress