Peter and Dick Meet Thomas Jefferson
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“Were it left to me to decide whether we should
have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,
I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Contrary to what the wingnuts are writing and wailing, this is about a lot
more than the New York Times. Given how they let Judy Miller run amok, if it were
just the Times, I'd let them swing. But it isn't, so I won't.
Today, Tony
Snow said that the Times deserves the brunt of the criticism, even though
the WSJ and the LA Times also wrote about the secret bank records monitoring
program. It just so happens that both the Journal and the LA
Times have conservative foundations, but hey, Fox “News” is the
official station of the White House, so what do you expect?
Glenn
Greenwald lays it out. Steve
Soto offers a poll:
AOL Online Poll, This Morning:
(Over 50,000 responses)1. Which branch of government do you trust the most?
Judicial: 55%
Legislative: 24%
Executive: 20%2. What do you think of the way President Bush uses presidential
power?He goes too far: 74%
I approve: 23%
He doesn’t go far enough: 4%
Peter King has been hawking his espionage charge everywhere. The man is a certifiable
loon (or is that “rabid lamb”?).
Charging the New York Times of violating the Espionage
Act is tantamount to claiming that Rush Limbaugh was representing Doctors
Without Borders on his recent trip to the Dominican Republic.
As for Dick
Cheney, well, Joe Biden got it right: “No, I don’t want to
respond to him. He’s at 20 percent in the polls. No one listens to him.
He has no credibility.”
Republicans need a reality check.
There's one word for what's being promoted from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the rubber
stamp Republicans in Congress. It's called FASCISM.
Besides, if the Republicans don't realize the terrorists already know how we're tracking their money we're in big trouble:
RON SUSKIND: I‘m sure the program is of some value, but I think the White House ought to be straight with people, that this has been a thing of diminishing return for several years now, this kind of electronic surveillance.
MATTHEWS: Well in your book, Ron, and I know you write books over the space a couple of years, you don‘t knock them out like even an enterprise piece by “The New York Times,” that you knew well before this little spat that the president and the vice president are getting into today. That you knew that the bad guys, al Qaeda and there are other people like them around the world trying to hurt us, had resorted to carriers, to physical people, human beings, carrying stuff around.
They used to use the Western Union, which I find fascinating, like reporters used to just file dispatches, they used Western Union and then they used electronic transfers. And then they got smart because they knew we were watching them.
SUSKIND: And the common knowledge in the tops of the intelligence community. Over time, they got smart. They adapted. Frankly, the whole point of the book is to show how our enemy has adapted and what we now have to do. That‘s one of the ways they frankly adapted. The administration can be very straight with people about this fact, it‘s something that a the a lot of people know.
MATTHEWS: Do you think, Ron Suskind, that when the president got up today and got excited about this enough to go on television and blast “The New York Times,” that he knew that the al Qaeda forces are against us in the world, already knew about this thing months ago, they didn‘t need to pick up “The New York Times” this weekend.
SUSKIND: I‘m not sure what the president knew or didn‘t. But the fact is this is common knowledge, what‘s in this book at the top as I see it, the intelligence community, I‘m sure he must have known that.
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